TravelpoolEurope (TPE), the consortium of Scandinavian companies which buys travel together, is to switching from self booking tools back to e-mails and phone calls for many of routes.
The decision was made last week and will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.
Soeren Schoedt, managing director of TPE, said the group was finding it “very difficult to get the right content if you have a low fares driven policy as we do.”
He said that in future online booking would only be done for about ten routers.
“We will use self booking only for as very, very limited number of routes where we are sure we will get the right price and the right performance. For the rest we shall be using the telephone and e-mails,” he said.
“We definitely believe that online is the way forward on one hand, but on the other hand we are in a position now where we say ‘Let's only do those very few routes where we know it will work.'”
TPE was set up in 1991 for companies with an annual travel spend of 135,000 as an advisory and purchasing organisation. Through bulk buying it says it can cut up to 25% off a member's annual budget.
Mr Schoedt said one problem that TPE was having was with technology for keeping up with content changes.
“There might be five different websites we have to check and for these dynamics we simply can't get the technology to work as fast as the changes appear on the content,” he said.
“We also have a very big problem now in Scandinavia with the new SAS one way fares because the truth is that while you can get one way fares to fly out and another to fly home, you can't do pricing across different airlines.
He said it often meant doing “treble searches” to find the right price and travellers were not prepared to do that.