E-business impacts on distribution channel in airlines

From the growth of Internet technology, many e-commerce principles have been introduced in airline industry. The computer reservation systems (CRS) has been considered as the first real-time business application and the earliest examples of e-commerce. In airlines, the early e-business activity was to build the web site for providing flight information to customers. Recently, many airlines are expanding the capability of the web site for selling tickets on the web to make use of the cheaper distribution channel. In this paper, we focus on the impacts of airline e-business being implemented in airline distribution channels. Using the conjoint analysis, we suggest a model for estimating the change of market sales for each distribution channel. With the empirical survey, we can find some implications on the e-business strategy and the effective internet marketing tools for airlines.