Sharaf claims victory in online race

Sharaf Travel has laid claim to the title of first travel agent in the Middle East to introduce online booking and payment features to its web portal.

The company’s claim followed a revamp of its website earlier last month, which has been modified to allow the booking and payment of holiday packages, insurance, car rental and flights.

Travel manager Premjit Bangara said the feature was developed in an attempt to capture a share of the growing online travel marketplace.

“We want to meet this demand [for online payments] and we didn’t really anticipate it earlier,” he admitted.

“Having seen the trend of people buying tickets through a secure gateway develop in this region, we have suddenly seen prices dropping in the market.

“Airlines have started introducing special fares on their own websites, which is translating into business moving away from the traditional travel agency setup.

“So we needed to embrace this trend and make sure that our product is as competitive as it was before.”

Although the online booking system appeared to be suffering a few minor teething issues when ATN investigated its functionality, a search for a flight from Sydney to Dubai departing October 1, with a return flight on October 15 revealed a surprisingly large number of results.

Disappointingly however, the cheapest tickets available were considerably more expensive than others found by ATN when conducting an identical search on expedia.com.

The company has announced plans to add low-cost flights and customisable package booking features to the website in the future.

Bangara also claimed the new web portal would be able to compete with larger global holiday booking sites, thanks to a recent partnership with UK-based travel firm Radius.

“Where we bring our expertise is in the local markets, but we can still be international an international player as well as a regional one because of the sheer volume of businesses we deal with,” he said.

“With websites like Expedia, we can say that we have what they have and a lot more. Many of the fares we have are not available to them.”