Airlines miss Net connection

If you sell into the travel industry, there's good news and bad news from SITA's recent Celebrating the Future conference. For while airlines cite Internet technology as crucial to their commercial development, they are still not matching that prediction with spend.

An airline IT trends survey, commissioned jointly by SITA and Airline Business, underlines how important Web technology is to the airline industry, especially for customer-facing services such as booking, reservations and check-in.

Eighty-five per cent of the world's airlines say they have already begun to adopt the open standards of the Internet in their business and IT systems, and all will need to use new technologies in order to complete in an increasingly aggressive global marketplace.

Airlines are currently selling 10 per cent or less of total ticket sales online, while 78 per cent plan to offer this service over the next two years.

Yet in spite of the increasing importance of Web-based activities, flight companies are still not backing their Internet intentions with cold, hard cash: on average, airlines are only allocating 10 per cent or less of their overall IT budgets to these new technologies.

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