Under a third of business travellers who buy full flexible tickets on short haul flights ever have to change them, new research has revealed.
Of the 32% who do, just 25% do so for business reasons while other charges are for personal reasons, the study by the Business Travel Research Centre at Cranfield University in the UK says.
The paper, The Value and Usage of Ticket Flexibility for Short Haul Business Travellers by Dr Keith Mason, said that because travellers did not change often, the ticket flexibility model offered by some low cost carriers was "more cost-efficient."
Dr Mason said cited an example ten trips from London to Amsterdam where three of the trips had to be changed.
The ten fully flexible business class tickets would cost about 6000 regardless of whether they were changed or not while the ten fully flexible full economy class tickets would cost 3000 again regardless of change.
But the ten low cost tickets including the extra money required for three changes would till only cost 1355, a saving of 77% on business class and 55% on full economy tickets.
Dr Mason said the use of business class on short haul had dropped from 60% in 1991 to 30% in 2003 with BA predicting that it would further fall in 2006 to 15%.
He said this was in part related to the perception that fully flexible tickets which are "significantly" higher priced than non-flexible tickets were seen by corporates and travellers as of less value than in the past.
In buying flexible tickets, corporates were in effect paying for something that the majority did not use.
Dr Mason said that the low cost carriers which offered change on a pay-as-you-go basis were also undermining the traditional fully flexible tickets.
He said: "Combining this pay-as-you-go flexibility with lower fares booked two weeks or more in advance means companies can significantly reduce short haul budgets.
"Increased fare transparency afforded by widespread availability of air fares on the Internet has also contributed to the reduced, relative value of business class and full economy tickets for short haul travel."
He suggested as a solution that traditional airlines could "de-bundle" the fully flexible element from the rest of the product "allowing business travellers to set the flexibility for each booked flight."