Major Chinese airlines are further cutting ties with Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd, the operator of the country's largest online airline ticket booking website, after removing their branded sales portals from the site in January.
China Southern Airlines Co has decided to stop selling tickets for China Southern flights through Qunar, including tickets sold through third-party agents, according to a statement the airline issued on Monday.
The airline made the decision due to "numerous complaints they received from customers," the statement said. In many of the grievances, customers complained about being overcharged when they bought or returned tickets on Qunar.
Smaller peer Fuzhou Airlines also withdrew all its tickets from Qunar from Tuesday.
The moves taken by China Southern and Fuzhou Airlines follow on the heels of a decision by Air China Ltd to stop selling tickets on the site on March 1.
According to media reports, Hainan Airlines Co may also soon follow suit for the same reasons.
The airlines' boycott of Qunar shows that they are determined to scour unethical third-party travel agents from the online marketplaces.
Cracking down
The online airline ticket booking sector requires strict regulation, said an industry insider surnamed Lu.
"Some airline ticket agents employ unethical business practices to make extra money by selling cheap airline tickets to price-sensitive consumers," Lu told the Global Times on Wednesday.
These practices have not only damaged the airlines' reputations, but also hurt consumers.
The Shanghai Consumer Council reported that it received 7,874 consumer complaints about airline ticket bookings from in 2015, up from 4,808 complaints in 2014.
Not all of the complaints were against Qunar. They also named Crip.com International Ltd and Alitrip, Alibaba Group Holding's online travel booking arm, for similar problems, such as bundling sales and posting unclear rules on how to return tickets, according to a statement from the council.
Under pressure from the airlines, Qunar issued a statement on Sunday that pledged to cooperate in the crackdown on unethical third-party agents.
The statement indicates that Qunar has changed its attitude about the third-party agents operating on its website. After nine airlines closed their own branded sales channels on Qunar in January, Qunar did not acknowledge its customer services problems.
As a platform that offers aggregated air ticket information to price-sensitive consumers, Qunar said on Sunday that it has a responsibility to supervise the third-party airline ticket sellers on its platform.
Qunar has suspended businesses with 21 undisciplined agents and vowed to carry out a comprehensive internal investigation into the matter.
Industry revamp
Analysts said airline companies could learn lessons from Qunar.
"Other online travel agencies such as Ctrip and Alitrip may also raise requirements for third-party agents operating on their platforms," Wei Changren, CEO of Beijing-based Jinlü Consulting, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
Neither China Southern nor Air China has offered any timetable for when they might resume selling on Qunar. Instead, they are encouraging travelers to go to their own websites and mobile applications to buy tickets.
Airline companies have been actively promoting their own-branded sales channels to guarantee improved customer services and boost revenue, Lu said.
This is in line with a requirement from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, which expects State-backed airlines to be selling half of their tickets via their own sales channels by 2017, media reports said.
Currently, the big airlines rely on third-party agents to sell tickets, though their own marketplaces are gaining popularity among customers.
In 2015, China's airlines sold 11.1 percent of total tickets in the country through their official websites, up from 7 percent in 2014, according to a report from Jinlü Consulting in February. For online sales, Qunar still leads with a 26.4 percent share of the market.
Lin Qian, a 30-year-old white-collar worker in Beijing, prefers to buy airline tickets through Air China's official website, which she said not only guarantees her good after-sales service, but also sometimes offers lower fares than online travel agencies.
"I am willing to pay more for better services," Lin said on Wednesday.
The price gap between airlines and agents has narrowed considerably since the beginning of 2015, when the major airlines began lowering the commissions they paid agents. By the middle of the year, they had cut commissions to almost zero.
The reduction in commission has squeezed many third-party agents out of the market.
"In Shijiazhuang, [capital of North China's Hebei Province], for instance, you can only see at most five offline third-party agents open for business, in comparison with previous years, when there were hundreds of them," Lu said.
