When you’re booking marine flights, it is likely that you will be looking for ways to get better marine fares. The pricing of flight tickets is always an issue with marine crewing agencies because often times there is a lot of complexity involved in controlling costs. On the other hand, there is also a lot of money spent on marine travel. Maybe it’s a good idea, to give you just a little background information on marine fares and how they come about.
How do travel agents provide you with marine fares?
Travel agencies require a license to serve their local market
Travel agencies require a license from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to offer flights. This license is bound to the country of the agency. As an agency serves its local markets, its license contains relevant flight coverage and relevantly associated airlines. The flight fares are also relevant to the local area.
Most travel agents book flights from or to a local airport. This means they have more negotiating power and better rates flying from or to their local airports. And the more traffic they can provide to fly certain routes, the more negotiating power they have. This means that they will have better prices and airlines will provide better coverage for these routes. As there is more demand, the offer will increase as well.
Seamen need to fly from everywhere to anywhere
Obviously, this also works the other way around. When an airport is located far away from the local market, it is not so likely that local travel agents have a sufficient amount of traffic to fly certain routes. This means that they will not have the best coverage with their airlines and they will not have the negotiating power to make it interesting for their market to fly these routes. This is ok because most locals wouldn’t want to fly these routes. Marine travel agents need to make seamen fly from everywhere to anywhere, so this is a challenge to them.
Traditional marine travel agencies
You just get a few flight options
When you request a flight with a traditional marine travel agency, they will use their local IATA license to look for the flight you need. Unfortunately, the flight you need is not a regular flight within your region. This request is quite complex and requires intense manual labour. A couple of hours later, your travel agent can only email you just a few flight options.
Even global agencies cannot use all their licenses for your query
Now let’s make it a little more interesting. Let’s say your travel agent is working for a global marine travel agency, which has travel agents all around the world. All these local travel agents have their local IATA licenses to book flights with. Would they work together and use each other’s IATA licenses, if it would come in handy?
Well, some claim they do. Still, it is highly unlikely that it would actually happen. If you would regard the time it takes for your travel agent to provide you with just a few flight options. How much time would it take, if he would bother his co-worker, in another region and time-zone? His colleague has his own targets to meet. He also has enough time-consuming work of his own too. So in reality, this just doesn’t happen.
Traditional travel agents struggle to give you the best marine fares
Altogether and due to the IATA license, this means that your travel agent struggles to give you the best available marine fares for routes your seamen need to fly. Apart from that, you will only receive a few flight options and you have no guarantees that these are the best available flight options and marine fares.
Marine fares with C Teleport
All our licenses work at the same time for every search
C Teleport is an international and the only completely online marine travel agency. We have no travel agents. All we have is our fully automated software platform, available through the web and with our app. We hold several IATA licenses and for every flight request submitted, we search multiple geographic sources and return you the best flight options available on the market, within minutes. Our methods are so exquisite, it makes it hard to be more expensive than our competitors.
