Saturday, January 17, 2009

Top Up When You Need To Fly

How are you charged for travelling on an airplane? You will tell your travel agent or airline office that you wanted to travel from a destination to another destination and your airfare could be determined by that.

But how do they determine that airfare? A fixed rate? A rate normally charged by various travel agents or airlines?

With low cost carrier like AirAsia and Tiger Airways plying this region, you have to surf their websites to catch the deal of the day to get a low price for your travel.

An airline in South Africa will buck the trend in charging their passengers in time to come. A revolution to the air travel industry, I would say so. If not mistaken, this is the first airline to do so in the world although the airline claimed that it's the first in South Africa.

Who are they? What sort of calculation do they adopt in determining the airfare?

I'm sure everyone has heard of the top up or purchasing of prepaid call time for mobile. Well, this airline doing something similar.

Airtime Airlines, owned by Blackbird Aerospace Corporation, is going to change the face of the air travel industry by charging passengers in terms of the number of minutes they travel from one destination to another. For a start, you need to get a starter pack.

For this, they have patented the words "Pay As You Fly".

Example, Destination A to Destination B takes only 60 minutes and you'll be charged at a certain rate per minute for that particular flight. You could have bought a top up for 120 minutes earlier and by now you have used up 60 minutes. Your next destination will be a 2 hours flight. In order to fly, you would have to top up another 60 minutes.

You would have to surf their website frequently to catch the best rate per minute. It could range from 3 Rand to 9 Rand (1 Rand = US$0.11) per minute.

If my usual airline was to adopt this method, my flight from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai of 7 hours will cost me (7 hours x 60 minutes x say 9 rand) = US$416. Wow!!!!!!

This is what I call, low cost carrier. Really low! It really depends on how much they want to charge you per minute.

Unfortunately, it's only available domestically in South Africa.
Tags: Airtime Airlines, South Africa, Blackbird Aerospace Corporation, Top Up, Pay As You Fly, Low Cost Carrier

8 comments:

Unknown said...

but what if the pilot purposely fly you longer up in the air?? need to pay more lo

acura said...

Air Asia can try using Touch n Go haha

Anonymous said...

sound good and very creative. just wondering how they measured the actual cost?

foongpc said...

Wow! That's very innovative. But yes, how they calculate the actual cost?

Jason Law said...

People always think of new business solution to attract more customers.

Quite an interesting way!

khengsiong said...

Simon Ho writes:
"but what if the pilot purposely fly you longer up in the air?? need to pay more lo"

Actually airlines save jet fuel by flying the planes at lower speed.

Johnny Ong said...

simon - there's a schedule indicating time required to reach that destination. u then top up accordingly

acura - the touch n go may malfunction at times

daniel - their business analyst has to be on his toes at all times

foong - just need a good cost planner, not easy though

jason - i wld say its very attractive

khengsiong - they wld have calculated / adjusted their top up pricing. who wld want to run a losing business

Kay Leaf said...

~*sounds good*~

easy to fly jor~

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