BOOKING A FLIGHT ONLINE, THAI STYLE
I've had some serious frustrations trying to book a flight (at a decent price) back to the UK for next week. In the UK there's a myriad of websites that offer online booking, not to mention lastminute.com for those, umm, last minute flights. In Thailand there's nothing.
Agents advertise, offering 'London for 22,000 baht return'. Of course those are the flights that were sold out a long time ago yet they're still promoting them as though they are available. I don't know why Thai travel agents haven't jumped onto the e-commerce bandwagon? I think Thai Airways is just about the only Thai-based site that offers instant confirmation.
This time I went with expedia's UK site. It allows you to book flights from Bangkok to London which almost none of the other sites do. After playing around for a while I found a reasonable (slightly less than 700 quid, but what do you expect for short notice, Easter holidays, Thai school holidays, etc) fare with British Airways on a Qantas flight. I was prepared to fly on any airline with stopovers if necessary, however this one worked out to be the cheapest.
4 comments:
An interesting discussion(Inputs by Thai people) on the state of e-commerce in Thailand is available at http://www.blognone.com/node/7162
I personally always prefer Air Asia to travel within the region due to its easy online booking system. AFAIK, if a travel agent has much higher costs if it issues a ticked for a journey originating from a country where they are not registered in.. So if you managed to get a good rate on expedia it is probably your luck that expedia had some special deal with the airlines or something.
We too are in the very early planing phase to setup an online ticketing service, maybe without instant confirmation.
Sajal. Thanks for your comments and for the link. I've used Expedia a number of times for booking flights out of Bangkok and I've always found them to be cheaper than both Thai travel agents and airlines themselves. I'm sure they do have higher costs but I guess they also get much higher discounts because of the volume they sell?
The other thing about Expedia is that it is constantly updated. The flight I got wasn't available the day before, so you need to keep checking and playing with dates (if you can) to get the best and most up-to-date deals.
http://www.bluenwhite.com/ let you book online - I've used them before to book tickets to Dublin - although usually you can't book the very cheapest fares - and they have their office in Khao San Road - Also www.gohop.ie lets you book tickets out of Bangkok - and you can normally book any fare they show - they are usually my supplier of choice.
Owen
Owen. Thanks for that. Much appreciated.
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