Factors that Influence Online Purchasing of Flight Tickets

Due to the growing popularity of online shopping, most businesses around the world have worked hard to improve their competitive advantage by focusing on the virtual business environment. In the airline industry, online purchasing of airline tickets (e-tickets) has dramatically changed industry and consumer behavior (Sulaiman, Ng, and Mohezar, 2008). Online purchasing reduced costs and provided new communication channels and support service offerings. An airline service provider provides services via an electronic infrastructure, in particular his website (Escobar-Rodríguez and Carvajal-Trujillo, 2013). Additionally, they are able to reduce their costs and expand revenues, create a reliable database of customers for future customer relationship management plans. Nonetheless, most of the studies concentrate on the relationship that exists between the online purchasing and customer satisfaction. Some of the specific research such as that done by Flavián, Guinalíu, and Gurrea, (2006) have focused on effect of online purchasing of flight tickets on customer satisfaction.

Literature review

Online Advertising

Advertising is made up of different activities that include the presentation to an audience a non-personal, sponsor-specific and paid-for message concerning a product or organization. Moreover, of all the marketing strategies, advertising remains the best tool that affects largely the minds of the viewers given that it has a wider scope of exposure. Advertising remains as one of the main elements that are used in the building of brands, raising awareness, providing information and increasing the sales with the end goal being to inform the intermediaries and assist in the expansion of markets.

Globally, there are several airlines companies and all of them use advertising as a way of reaching out the customers. However, the degree of online adverts has been varying from one company to the other. There are different advertising options that are employed in airlines and they include inflight magazine, use of regional websites, overhead lockers, and meal tray backs (Hassanein and Head, 2007). Online adverts are known to have a long-run influence on inter-industry market shares. Progressive online advertising has cumulative effect on the response of customers. Through online adverts, there is increased awareness of air transport that is made through constant exposure and hence creating an identification of a specific carrier or carriers with route, market or region.

In a study done by Bigné, Hernández, Ruiz and Andreu (2010), the use of online and internet advertising is preferred by the airlines during the sales campaigns on free or low-cost seats and the internet remains the best medium to induce consumers to purchase items. For most of the online adverts, the airline companies are working to position themselves as the low budget airlines through low price tickets and even getting free tickets to the customers. Part of the online adverts includes aggressive marketing, creativity that accompanies branding and even aggressive advertising.

Pricing

Generally, price alludes to value that an item has. In most modern economies, the price is synonymous to currency. To respond to the customer demand, prices are often adjusted and this is known as a pricing strategy. The pricing strategy has the objective of coming up with the optimal price that will realize profit maximization and maximization of the number of units that are sold. Price remains to be a critical factor and parameter that influence the revenue in industries to a large extent. Price remain to be one of the significant dimension that ensures there is e-satisfaction. A study that was done by Bigné, Sanz, Ruiz, and Aldás, (2010) focusing on airline ticket purchase attitude revealed that the most important way of attracting the customers to purchase tickets online is through focusing on the total savings of money that happen when tickets are purchased online. Owing to the low-air tickets in place, most airlines have been able to implement domestic travels more frequently. Using e-tickets have been quite beneficial to many people as it is preferred to be environmentally friendly as long as there is a reduction in the use of paper. Also, the printing paper ticket can help in reduction of the traveling cost and the airlines can use the e-tickets portfolio to enhance and boost the customer loyalty program. Most of the airlines have been engaging in direct sales through the websites and the call centers. Owing to this, the airlines end up not paying their commissions to the travel agents. The number of those using e-ticketing to buy airline tickets is increasing. The main driving factor for the e-ticketing is the low-cost nature of the airlines that have embraced the online system. The low-cost nature coupled with quality service provision have given most of the airlines competitive edge over the rest. This then implies that pricing remains a factor that influences online purchase. If the price is high, very few will go for the online and even consider purchasing their flight tickets online. It is assumed that the use of online tickets is an incentive to the airlines hence their fares should be cheap owing to the low cost of production and efficiency levels (Verhagen, Meents and Tan, 2006).

Interactivity

Another important factor that affects the online purchasing of flight tickets is interactivity. Interactivity means that problems can be effectively handled and then responses availed to the customer through the site. Interactivity is a dialogue between the customer and the website through the website or by email and the chat programs. The level of interactivity is gauged by the manner in which questions of the customers are answered with the intention of saving the customer’s time and increase the quality of electronic service. As noted in a study done by Sam, Fazli and Tahir (2009), responsive websites ensure that the queries of customers are addressed and responded to promptly. Interactivity affects the level of customer satisfaction through the internet. Therefore, interactivity has a positive influence on customer satisfaction in regards to the purchase of e-ticket.

Payment Security

Whenever customers think of purchasing items online, security remains a key issue. Often, most of the business to consumer trades are paid using credit cards while the rest are paid using the other modes of online cash transfers. For all the payment methods that are used online, they request payment security and also requires website security and quality. Amaro and Duarte (2015) noted that when customers decide to purchase goods online, nearly 75% of the Internet shopper stress on credit-card security (Ruiz-Mafé, Sanz-Blas, and Aldás-Manzano, 2009). Having a high level of website security can lead to satisfaction of the customer’s intentions. Therefore, it is no doubt that payment security has a positive influence on the customer satisfaction as far as purchasing of the e-ticket is concerned. This means that for airline tickets, there is no exception at all.

Trust

Online trust remains a big factor in a good number of buyer-seller transaction and remains a critical factor for the online transaction and e-commerce gave the uncertain nature of the environment and the incompleteness of the information that is usually shared on the websites (Shah Alam, and Mohd Yasin, 2010). According to Bart, Shankar, Sultan and Urban (2005), online trust in e-commerce websites remains to be positively linked to the e-commerce participation and the greater website online trust leads to greater consumer loyalty in as far as the website is concerned. The online trust of consumers in the online environment is very critical in adapting new technologies given that the vendors serve customers in very unpredictable ways. Online shopping has greater risk compared to the traditional modes (Aldás-Manzano et al., 2009). The risk occurs because buyers do their transaction without meeting each other and there are even higher chances of fraud. Therefore, the building of online trust is required to help in reduction of consumers risk perception and reluctance in purchase intention (Kim, Ferrin and Rao, 2008; Ling et al., 2011). Lack of online trust is a principle reason for the buyer and the seller to avoid any kind of online trading (Chen and Barnes, 2007). So for one to be trustworthy, reliability, integrity, and kindness are key as they help in building the customer’s trust level, reduce the thought of risk inherent and then increase the purchase intention when purchasing the flight tickets online (Hsin Chang and Wen Chen, 2008). The customers trust in the airline or what is known as e-trust plays a critical role in the decision to complete a transaction and also in the purchase of products on the online platform. There are several studies that suggest that e-trust remains a relevant factor in the success of online business. According to Bigné, Hernández, Ruiz and Andreu (2010), the earlier studies found out that e-trust is a strong predictor of satisfaction in online context.

Literature review scope

The literature will mainly cover the factors that influence online purchasing of flight tickets. This means that physical factors will not be covered. Additionally, the factors that do not affect the purchase in the airline industry will be ignored. Narrowing the scope ensures that the research covers the research objectives exhaustively.

1.2 Literature review objectives

In this literature review, the specific objectives will be on:

To find out the impact of online advertisement on online purchase of flight tickets

To establish the effect of pricing on online purchase of flight tickets

To determine the impact of trust on online purchase of flight tickets

To establish the effect of interactivity on online purchase of flight tickets

To find out the effect of payment security on online purchase of flight tickets

2.0 Literature review comparative analysis

Comparing the different studies, it has emerged that online trust affects the intention of customers to buy tickets and this eventually affects the purchase of airline tickets online. In a study done by Bianchi and Andrews (2012), the consumers’ trust in any internet store influences the attitude and perceived risk, which Becerra and Korgaonkar (2011) affirms that it affects the willingness of persons to purchase. Lack of trust become one of the most frequent reasons why consumers are relaxed to carry on with transaction through the internet and they may refuse to involve others in online transaction.

2.1 Different theme development

The main themes that arise from the studies include:

Online advertisement- It positively affects online purchasing of flight tickets.

Trust- Positively affects the consumer purchasing intention hence affects online purchasing of flight tickets positively.

Interactivity- Interactivity affects the level of customer satisfaction through the internet. Therefore, interactivity has a positive influence on customer satisfaction in regards to the purchase of e-ticket.

Payment Security- Payment security has positive influence on the customer satisfaction as far as purchasing of the e-ticket is concerned

Research gap and contribution

There are some other factors such as the internet experience and the knowledge that affect the online purchase of flight tickets. Additionally, also issues such as brand image and quality of website affect the online purchase of flight tickets given their effect on customer perception. This study has not covered these factors. Therefore, it is suggested that the future research cover the factors and find out their influence on online purchasing of flight tickets.

Conclusion

E-commerce has brought with it numerous changes as far as shopping habits of consumers are concerned. Online purchasing of flight tickets is a facet of e-commerce. Interestingly, customers nowadays do not rely on the physical cue to make a purchase decision. There are various factors online that affect their decisions and include trust, security, online advertisement and interactivity levels (Rose, Hair and Clark, 2011). These factors, in fact, affect the purchase intention of consumers that in the end affect the online purchase of flight tickets. From this study, it has been revealed that trust, payment security, online advertisement, low-pricing positively relate to purchase intention online hence affecting the buying of flight tickets. To ensure that there is increased competitiveness in a flight, the company needs to be keen on the factors that have been discussed. In fact, increasing the consumers’ trust seems to override all the other factors (Harridge-March, 2006).

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