Air Deccan to sell tickets from post offices

Low-cost carrier Air Deccan is all set to land and take-off from a territory that has virtually no tarmac. The budget carrier will now be present in rural India through the multitude of post offices, encouraging farmers to experience a plane journeys. Sources said that the airline is tieing up with the postal department to offer e-tickets. This is the first time that any airline is attempting such widespread reach, since post offices are present in just about every village and town. The airline will initially leverage the 500 internet-enabled post offices in Karnataka, of the total of over 2,500 post offices in the state, to reach out to the common man. The services will be launched in Karnataka by the month end or the beginning of July.

By the end of the year, the airline is hopeful of tieing up with seven other state postal departments. The way it works will be simple. A farmer will just have to walk to his taluk post office and purchase an e-ticket, paying cash up-front. The airline's back-end support ensures that a central server monitors the daily ticketing sales. On a daily basis the postal department will transfer the overall ticket sales to the airline. By facilitating ticket sales, post offices earn a commission similar to that of travel agents. Already, a 1,000 postal personnel have been trained by the airline to access the website of Air Deccan and issue e-tickets. If the company had to reach out to the masses via the conventional channel (of setting up an office and other infrastructure), it would have had to spend several hundreds of crores of rupees.

"Here, the only expenditure the airline has incurred is the training costs," said the source. Currently, internet booking through its website accounts for 40% of Air Deccan's ticket sales; its partners like BPCL, HPCL, Reliance Web World, agents and web-portals bring in an equivalent share; and the rest of the 10% is done at airports. Capt G R Gopinath, executive chairman of Air Deccan, had recently said that even carpenters and autorickshaw drivers have been flying his airline. With the latest initiative, an even wider section of Indians may experience the joy and convenience of flying.

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