January 13th, 2004

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Media
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Ticket Booking Bogosity

This article, with a big inforgraphic, is on the cover of the business section of today’s Vancouver Sun. It reports how a study finds that travel agencies have the lowest prices for flights in Canada:

Canadian companies pay too much money for airline flights if they bypass travel agents and buy their own tickets over the Internet, according to a study funded by corporate travel agencies in Canada.

Funded by corporate travel agencies? How does this story even qualify as news? It’s clearly placed by the PR people of the Canadian Corporate Travel Association (they don’t appear to have a website). Admittedly, the reporter speaks to a representative from an online travel site, but he hardly trades in facts. Any reader knows that the large info-graphic expressing the CCTA’s party line is far more effective than the article’s text. This is shameful laziness on the part of the newspaper…they are essentially reprinting the CCTA’s press release. If they were actually interested in writing about this subject, they should have conducted their own survey.

This is incidental to my point, but in terms of reliability and service, I’ll always go with an online travel site over an agency. The only times I’ve had heinous travel experiences are through agencies.

Comments: 2 Responses so far

bree
January 13th, 2004
8:13 pm

I had a similar reaction to the article. I also think it’s bogus that they used Expedia as the online travel service. I’ve booked most of my flights in the last couple of years via Air Canada. They have great last-minute web fares that are usually better than what the discount carriers charge. The downside is that it’s a crapshoot, but even when I had to fly to Sudbury I was able to find the flight I was looking for.

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Todd
January 15th, 2004
8:50 am

The Sun’s understanding of statistics and polls and studies is pretty thin at best. This is the same paper that had as three separate categories in the same list “transportation”, “roads” and “busses”. That’s like comparing “fruits” “trees” and “apples”.

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