Customers of Argentine ultralow-cost (ULCC) carrier Flybondi can now resell their tickets, its website says.<\/p>\n
With the innovation, Flybondi is the first airline to allow ticket reselling, according to the Spanish-language industry news site Aviacion al Dia.<\/p>\n
The Buenos Aires-based airline stamped itself as a ticketing innovator in March, when, in partnership with the NFT ticketing company TravelX, it began issuing its airlines tickets as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. The Ticket 3.0 platform, as Flybondi calls it, has been enabling customers to rename, gift or transfer tickets since that time, all without speaking with an agent.<\/p>\n
In a recent webinar, Flybondi CEO Mauricio Sana discussed some of the reasoning behind facilitating airline ticket resales, noting how common the practice is in other industries, such as concerts.<\/p>\n
As an example, he discussed a situation in which a traveler obtains a ticket at a low price, which subsequently goes way up in value. The airline, he said, regrets underpricing the ticket. Meanwhile, the traveler holds a commodity that can be resold for a profit.<\/p>\n
By allowing the customer to make such a sale and extracting a fee in the process, the airline increases revenue while the customer makes money.<\/p>\n
“In the end it is a seat, a seat that was already sold cheaply, and now I’ve improved the sale,” Sana said.<\/p>\n