The primary purpose of the website is to provide an interactive, easy to use, platform that allows customers to view, book and pay for their flights and travel needs. Without having to book through the phone or the customer service counters, the potential customers are able to access the website anytime and anywhere. www.tigerairways.com is able to reach out to any part of the world. Tiger Airways demolished the traditional concept of a brick and mortar sale environment. By bringing Tiger Airways online allows Tiger Airways to significantly reduce costs which will be carried down to the customers, such as transaction costs and agency costs. For example, reducing the numbers of customer service officers at the back end. By offering the lowest air fares allows Tiger Airways to remain competitive in the budget airline market and attract more customers, especially those who are seeking for budget travels.
Tiger Airways, like many e-firms, has several e-businesses. It's primany business is a VIRTUAL STOREFRONT selling its own airline's tickets and own specialised package tours (which they are fully responsible for the service level quality). The other business is that of a TRANSACTION BROKER, acting as a commission agent for many hotels, car rental firms and insurance firms. They do not own any of these firms, and are not responsible for the service quality (of these principal firms) and cannot be sued for this.
Features
Business Model
Unlike a brick and mortar store-front, Tiger Airways moves its operations to the world wide web and adopts a Business to Consumer (B2C) business model. For example, www.tigerairways.com transacts directly with individual customers for personal travel. Tiger Airways adopts a Business to Business (B2B) type of business model as well. For example, www.tigerairways.com partners with third parties such as hotels, travel agencies, insurance companies, aiming to serve as a one stop service provider for its travellers. Customers not only can book their tickets online, they also can book their hotels and buy their travel insurance through www.tigerairways.com.
Other features
Wide Range of Services
- www.tigerairways.com offers a wide range of service apart from ticket booking. It offers hotel booking, car hire, travel insurance services by partnering with the participating hotels and agencies.
Tiger Add-Ons
- Seat Selector - Enables passengers to select their preferred seat with Seat Selector at a affordable fee.
- Sports Equipment Check-In -This feature offers passengers a fuss-free check in of their sports equipments. It allows customers to check in their sports equipments during their booking and make payment for their travel needs all at one go.
- Luggage Upsize - www.tigerairways.com offers customers more allowances for their luggage. They can travel with 7kg of hand luggage for free. They can buy their check-in luggage allowance in advance during booking of their flights. www.tigerairways.com offers 4 different weight allowances.
- Members can get the latest travel deals before anyone else with their member newsletter. They alert their members of travel deals before they advertise them to the public.
- Online payment at www.tigerairways.com is secured by VeriSign, the global leader in online security for e-commerce payments.
- They are accessible 7 days a week via email, phone or fax if customers have any queries with their online booking.
Travel Tools
- Everything to help their customers prepare for their trip such as useful destination information, a currency converter, global weather forecasts, visa requirements, flight schedules, insurance and more.
Designs
www.tigerairways.com has adopted an orange color scheme for its website and also its affiliate’s website. This is consistent with Tiger Airways’s branding as they use a tiger for their logo. Also, the website’s usage of tabbed browsing makes different segments of the site, easy for customers to navigate and look for what they want.
Strengths
User friendly website with one-stop needs to a cheap start to a budgeted travel trip beside able to book air tickets online, there are other travel services like hotels, car rentals services, travel insurance and budget accommodation services. The website is well-organised to assist users to find information more efficiently.
To ensure the safety of the information provided by the purchaser, Tiger Airways uses Verify by Visa and MasterCard® SecureCode™ to prevent unauthorized use of the credit cards through the use of a personal pin.
The safety lock on the right bottom corner of the page ensures safe disclosure of information.
e-Commerce has benefited Tiger Airways on the whole in entering new markets, reducing cost, improve knowledge sharing, enhance customer service, improve communication, reduce time to market, create new products and services, fostering innovation and supporting globalisation.
Weaknesses
As compared to its competitors, Tiger does not support some of the services such as currency converter function to ease customers for the trouble of converting themselves. Customers are also restricted by the limited choice of using either credit or debit card as mode of payment for their flight tickets purchased online. Competitor, AirAsia, allows customers to pay by paypal.
Security
Tiger Airways uses encryption so that even if someone intercepts the data they cannot decode it back to the original data. The standard encryption system for the www.tigerairways.com website is SSL (Secure Socket Layer), which uses a form of public key encryption, where the information which can be encoded by the browser.
The Tiger Airways flight booking engine uses 128-bit encryption to ensure that information is virtually impossible to read for anyone unless they have the relevant 'key' or password. SSL is mandatory for www.tigerairways.com use.
A server certificate is a piece of digitally-encrypted information that lets the browser know what organisation it is accessing. To prevent people just making up certificates and pretending to be official organisations, certificates are obtained from a certificate authority, who use their position as a third party to verify that the organisation using the certificate is who they say they are.
Tiger Airways uses SSL to protect the information recorded in the flight booking database, and is registered with Verisign, a recognised certificate authority.
Problems
Some challenges that Tiger Airways may face are:
- Security
- Technology
- Competition
How the site attracts its customers
The website offers easy accessibility in obtaining information such as low fares, flight schedules, or details of route network in Asia Pacific region. Latest technology, from IBM, HP and Cisco, has been used in maintaining the website to ensure overall enhanced user experience. The website is designed with user friendliness as priority, pleasing colour-combinations to the eyes, and information neatly presented, aims to give users a pleasant surfing experience. The homepage exhibits links to various information in a glance. Additional services such as hotels, travel insurance, budget accommodation and car rental are also positioned in a prominent fashion which further aids the customers in their travel plans. The website is designed to be compatible with most browsers on the Windows platform.
In 2006, Tiger Airways launched its Chinese language website in response to overwhelming demand from China customers for more information on its China - Singapore flights and other routes. With the launch, Chinese language users were able to obtain details of Tiger Airways flights and promotions in Chinese on Tiger Airways website. Booking is done online with payment through China international credit cards.
Recently, Tiger Airways has also launched its Bahasa Malaysia website in response to feedback from customers to access Tiger products and services in their preferred language. The real winners of this launch are travellers and customers of Tiger Airways. They are set to enjoy Tiger's promotional deals and low fares. Tiger Airways' Bahasa Malaysia website features easy to navigate menus, an easy 4-step booking process, and on-site information support to answer frequent customer queries. The website is designed to better serve its customers who are coming from increasingly diverse nationalities and language preferences. The new language capabilities also mean that the carrier can interact with a much wider audience than ever before. Having other language websites is something that will help customers visits them on-line more frequently. Now that it is an option and more people can avail themselves of the low fares across their network of destinations in Asia Pacific.
Tiger Airways' English language website, which is the number one searched website on Google in Singapore, has about two million visitors per month and is a hotly sought after channel from an advertising perspective. Tiger's increasing regional footprint and the opportunities for a greater audience with more language options is evidenced by the huge number of overseas visitors to the website. In a recent Hitwise report, www.tigerairways.com is among the 'Top Three' websites within Singapore.
How the site maintains the level of trust for its customers
Tigers Airways maintains customers’ trust by its fulfilment time. The period from initial order to delivery is reduced significantly since the tickets and seats are confirmed immediately, the customer can print out his itinerary and air-ticket as soon as payment is made. Direct order and configuration also reduces order-entry errors which can be made by service staff at a physical shop. The site also increases the level of service by providing personalized and accurate customer information, with better tracking and performance measurement. The chances of the service personnel at the physical store making a typo error decrease 100%. Thus the risk of having a boarding pass with the wrong name is of zero chances also means no hassle and trouble for customer just before boarding the plane because a ticket with the wrong name will not allow the passenger access to the aircraft.
Furthermore, Tiger Airways uses SSL to increase its security, allowing users to use their website without fear of misused information obtained. Furthermore, the website uses encryption, so even if the data is intercepted, the data cannot be decoded it back to the original data. The standard encryption system for the website is SSL (Secure Socket Layer), which uses a form of public key encryption, where the information which can be encoded by the browser.
Complaints
There are grouses over failure to honour contracts (for example, trip cancelled without notice), misrepresentation and misleading advertisements on pricing as its online pricing details are not sufficiently transparent. This is because the airline charges extra for luggage space and credit card booking. For consumer, these hidden costs can be misleading because they might be comparing prices with other airlines. 'These budget airlines may be low cost but it shouldn't be at the expense of their service.
There is also no offices/branches information in the website. There is only one call center number provided, which is always continuously engaged, which leads to suspicion if the line is active or someone has just kept the phone on.
