If Mallya and other Head Honcos of airline industry have their way, we can find cute hostess booking air ticket at the counter. The days of contacting your neighbourhood travel agent will be history. We will have professional ticket booking staff from the Airlines directly interacting with the customer.

Airline industries want to get rid of all travel agents who were given a hefty commission of nearly 10%, which was hurting their costing. Morever many travel agents started using airline funds, which hurt them the most. Any business worth its salt would pay a reasonable margin to their franchisees and agents, but when the franchisee starts using up the funds of the organisation collected in advance by the travel agents, than it really hurts the cash flows.

Franchisees or travel agents should be paid a maximum of 5% if they immediately pay up the cash. If not they should be paid 2% commission if they pay up after one months credit. In case of credit card payments too 2% commission would be ideal. Now the move of the airline management seems to triggered pigeons among the travel agents.

The agents in turn have planned to charge Rs 350 per ticket for domestic economy class and for business class it would be Rs 500 plus. The international ticket booking would be minimum of Rs 3000/- onwards. Under this circumstances, the passengers would definitely move towards booking directly with the airlines rather than depending on the agents.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this move is contemplated to keep the excess manpower recruited by Jet and Kingfisher fully employed. This new mantra may have been discovered to open branches and booking points to deploy the excess man power.

There is always a fear of politics creeping up along with inefficiency when there is excess manpower in any organisation. This seems to be a hot spot and headache for the HODs in the airline industry. The best way to deploy the excess staff seems to be getting rid of the intermediary.

The other alternative may be deploy some excess staff in the travel agents office to guide the passengers and help in booking the tickets, which some cos resort to.

So friends now say good bye to travel agents and start booking directly with the airlines. You never know you might get to know how efficiently they operate and save some 5% in the bargain. Happy flying for some, and happy video conferencing for some, because most of the companies are discouraging flying. If at all one needs to fly than he will be looking for Give me Red, with hostess booking their tickets.