Asia Pacific Low Cost Airlines – Holidays and Accommodation Review

There are now an abundance of low cost airlines in the Asia Pacific region, and rightly so, especially when this vast area accounts for a large percentage of the worlds population.

I have reviewed 59 low cost airline websites across this region with a view to gaining a picture of what supplementary holidays and accommodation products the airlines are now providing.

There is a supporting document of full results can be seen at http://www.edwhiting.com/asiapacificairlines.pdf

Holidays Summary
There were some interesting results from the holidays summary. I was looking for the airline to provide some kind of holiday which involves their flights. This was categorised as either a Flight + Hotel or a Package. The Flight + Hotel is the same thing in this case as a Dynamic Package allowing the user to search for a flight and applicable hotels in one single price with flexible dates. The Package is a fixed package with a single price for the duration provided e.g. 7 nights. Unavailable was that the website was having some technical glitches at the time of review.

In the results 73% didn’t provide any form of holiday for the user and 22% did provide holidays. Although this doesn’t necessarily show volume in passengers it does show a clear mark that these airlines are not providing holidays as a whole.

No Holidays - 43 / 73%
Packages - 7 / 12%
Flight + Hotel - 6 / 10%
Unavailable - 3 / 5%

Accommodation Summary
The accommodation review was to find out which airlines had a hotel or accommodation product on sale on their website. 51% didn’t provide any accommodation, 46% did and 3% was unavailable. Of the airlines that did provide accommodation, the most interesting find was that it is dominated by OctopusTravel.com (over half the airlines that provide accommodation) which provides a white labelling service to the airlines. There were a few other white label service providers which all provide to one or max two airlines. These include: Expedia – WWTE.com, Travelguru.com, Travelpartnerweb.com, Rates2go.com, Bookhostels.com, Roamfree.com, Wotif.com and Travel.Rakuten.co.jp. There were a few that didn’t rely on a white label and had accommodation built into their website. I classed these as In-House, however this could just be either in-house contracting or a close technology integration into another provider.

No Accommodation - 30 / 51%
OctopusTravel.com - 14 / 24%
Other Provider - 8 / 14%
In-House - 5 / 8%
Unavailable - 2 / 3%


Summary
There are only 6 airlines offering Flight + Hotel, however 27 offering accommodation. Of the accommodation providers OctopusTravel.com dominates but only seems to provide a white label solution. Although this review isn’t indicative of the number of passengers travelling, there does show clearly that the low cost airlines that provide accommodation could provide a better integration of accommodation into their product offering. This could be in the form of a Flight + Hotel search which gives the customer real flexibility and the airline the ability to potentially earn more money out of each customer. This is an opportunity for either some of the other accommodation providers or OctopusTravel.com to beef up their offering to get more sales from the growing Asia Pacific low cost airlines.

To see more details of the review go to http://www.edwhiting.com/asiapacificairlines.pdf