Barriers to Online Booking of Scheduled Airline Tickets

SUMMARY In the early years of e-Commerce, the tourism sector had high expectations for online booking. All the major airlines invested huge sums of money, not only to make booking features available, but also to integrate them into attractive, easy-to-use Web offerings. Nevertheless, even after years of investment and improvements, the booking ratio for all but the no-frills airlines is still disappointing. This paper discusses reasons for the slow adoption of online booking. Online booking systems are analyzed as consumer information environments for scheduled airline tickets. The analyses are based on two experiments conducted in 1999 and 2002 respectively. The negative effects of the underlying market structure and the product complexity in the adoption of online booking is also discussed.

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