CheapTickets

CheapTickets
legal form	Privately owned
founding	2001
Seat	Oosterhout , Netherlands
management	John Mangaars (CEO)
Number of employees	80 (2009)
sales	150 million euros (2009)
Branch	Tourism / online travel agency
Website	www.cheaptickets.de

CheapTickets is an online travel portal specializing in flight bookings. The company headquarters is in Oosterhout (Netherlands). The company is a trademark of Travix , which in turn belongs to BCD Holdings .

The website cheaptickets.com belongs to the US company Orbitz , which in turn is a subsidiary of Expedia .

history

Lex Beins and Ton Berends, who were fascinated by the possibilities of the Internet from an early age, had the idea to found the company. They began developing and evaluating an online travel portal as early as the mid-1990s. Lex Beins bought the Beins travel agency from his parents in 1996 and successfully further developed the business model. B. with self-organized language trips. The entry of Ton Berends and the associated growth ensured the necessary financial independence to enable CheapTickets to be founded and developed as an independent company without outside capital.

CheapTickets was founded in 2001 with the website CheapTickets.nl as a subsidiary of the Dutch Beins Travel Group in the Netherlands. In 2007, expansion on the European market followed with the introduction of CheapTickets.de in the German market. In the same year CheapTickets.ch went online for Switzerland and GreenTickets.at for Austria. CheapTickets is currently represented in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition to the headquarters in the Netherlands, there is a reservation and service center in Saarbrücken, which is responsible for the entire German-speaking region, and an office on Curaçao .

Products

According to its own information, it is the largest travel portal in the Netherlands. The main business of the company is the brokerage of flights. Hotels, rental cars and package tours are also offered. The websites use the Amadeus reservation system . In 2009, trips were arranged for over 150 million euros. The products that are described on the CheapTickets websites are not only their own offers, but also link to existing offers on the Internet. CheapTickets uses screen scraping technology , the automatic reading of tariffs on airline websites.

On all of the company's portals, an eco value is displayed for the flights offered, which shows the CO ₂ emissions generated for the selected flight. The value is represented by five letter differentiations from A to E and a colored traffic light system. Voluntary emissions offsetting is also possible through the NGO Greenseat when booking. In 2010 the company received the Green Feather ( Groene Veer ) environmental award for these initiatives from the Dutch travel magazine Reisrevue and the Travel Foundation .

The company is affiliated with the International Air Transport Association and a member of the Travel Money Insurance Association (SGR). In 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 CheapTickets was nominated as Europe's Leading Travel Agency at the World Travel Awards .

Criticism from customers

CheapTickets' business practices are harshly criticized by many customers. On the field report portal Ciao! the company was rated by 64 users (as of January 12, 2012). In 57 of the 64 ratings, CheapTickets was given the worst rating on the five-point scale. Many complaints relate to the fact that no ticket was issued after the supposedly completed booking and payment or that higher prices were subsequently demanded from Cheaptickets. Other points of criticism are the lack of availability and competence of customer service, high prices on the hotline and difficulties in processing cancellations.

For online bookings, CheapTickets offers the only free payment option, Sofortüberweisung , in which the buyer has to entrust secret account access data (PIN and TAN) to a third party (the company Sofort AG). All other payment options cost surcharges (e.g. € 9.95 in May 2013) that are higher than the price advantage of CheapTickets compared to other travel portals.

Conflict with Ryanair

The Irish low-cost airline Ryanair tried to prevent CheapTickets from reading their pages using screen scraping . At the end of February 2010, the Hamburg Regional Court decided for the first time in an ordinary lawsuit and not in an urgent procedure for CheapTickets that the brokerage of Ryanair flight tickets through CheapTickets was legally in order. According to the judgment of the regional court, the use of the Internet technology screen scraping is expressly permitted. As early as 2008, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court found in the relevant proceedings (Az .: 6 U 221/08) that automatic booking inquiries that CheapTickets carries out using screen scraping are only representative business for passengers. The automatic reading of flight and tariff information via screen scraping is legally compliant as long as travel agencies do not act as tour operators towards the customer, but merely provide them with a transport service. CheapTickets was the first flight broker in Germany to successfully defend the screen scraping method in a lawsuit.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Amadeus: CheapTickets re-signs a major agreement with Amadeus . November 2009, accessed October 13, 2010.
2. ↑ CheapTickets: Fly Green ( Memento of the original from August 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . October 2010, accessed October 13, 2010.  
3. ↑ Greenseat: GreenSeat supporter  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . October 2010, accessed October 13, 2010.  
4. ^ Travel Foundation: Cheap Tickets wint Groene Veer . January 2010, accessed September 29, 2010. (Dutch)
5. ^ World Travel Awards . 2010, accessed on October 13, 2010. (English)
6. ↑ Testimonials from Cheaptickets ( Memento of the original from May 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , January 2012, accessed January 12, 2012. 
7. ↑ Hamburg Regional Court, file number 310 O 31/09, February 2010
8. ↑ Heise Online: Easyjet is subject to screen scraping litigation . October 2010, accessed October 13, 2010.
9. ↑ Dirk Rogl: Scrapst you still or connectest you already . March 16, 2010, accessed September 29, 2010.