One of India's leading private telecom service providers, Tata Teleservices and mobile commerce solutions firm, PayMate have come together to offer flight-ticketing service on the mobile phone to Tata IndiCom's subscribers across India.
The service enables real-time flight bookings across all domestic airlines at the best available fares. The service is targeted at frequent fliers on low-cost and full-service airlines who value the convenience of flight ticketing anywhere, anytime via the mobile phone, instead of being limited to Internet access on a computer.
Announcing the launch of the service, Pankaj Sethi, President, Value Added Services, Tata Teleservices Ltd, in a statement said, “Ticketing has been one of the most popular m-Commerce applications in the mobile telephony space—this is because convenience and flexibility on time are big pull factors. We are excited to partner with PayMate and add flight ticketing application in bouquet of value-added-services.”
All that Tata Indicom subscribers need to do is download the application on a one-time basis from the Tata Zone so as to be able to use the service. The application is available for anything between Rs 10 for a three-day trial to Rs 30 per month.
To start using the service, subscribers need to follow a few simple steps: first, select origin city, destination city, and travel date to get a list of all flights with timings and best fares; then, choose their preferred flight along with passenger name/s and email ids; further, enter their credit card details over a secure connection; and finally, pay to get an instant booking confirmation.
“Considering the rapid proliferation of mobile handsets in the country, the cell phone is emerging as the premier device for conducting transactions. Partnering with a leading player like Tata Indicom will just make this facility available across several million handsets in one go and provide an extremely convenient ticketing channel for customers,” said Ajay Adiseshann, Founder and Managing Director, PayMate.
The company, in partnership with PayMate, has also plans to offer a range of ticketing applications in the near future, the company release said. Tata Teleservices has operations in more than 4,000 towns across 20 circles in India and has a customer-base of over 2.1 crore.
PayMate has also partnered with Kingfisher airlines to launch an SMS-based ticketing service, it added. PayMate is already accepted at over 5000 merchants and can be used to pay for purchase online, over the phone and across the counter via the mobile.