Airfare in Shenzhen market will see a fall rather than a rise during the upcoming May Day holidays.

"It's unusual, but it will happen," said Chen Liangjun, manager of an air ticket agency called Tehang, explaining that weeklong vacation fever was dying out.

Another very important reason was that "the airline companies have sufficient transportation capacity," Chen said. In fact, transportation capacity will be more than sufficient, since all companies have chosen to add extra flights during the holidays.

China Southern Airlines, the largest carrier on the local market, will add an extra 252 flights during the holidays.

Shenzhen Airlines, the second largest carrier in Shenzhen, will add 176 flights during the same period. "It's expected that holiday airfares will be 15 percent cheaper on average than during the non-holiday time," said Hou Bin, spokesperson of Shenzhen Airlines.

A similar situation will obtain for other airline companies that have flights linking to Shenzhen. Air China will offer a 30-percent discount for its holiday flights, and Hainan Airlines will have a discount of 40 percent.

However, China Eastern Airlines and Sichuan Airlines both expressed that they would stick to full price for their flights during the holidays.

About one month ago, the airlines that have flight connections in Shenzhen formed a "price union," intended to curtail the vicious cycle of price competition. But in the face of the upcoming holidays, the union has begun to split up. "A price union has never lasted," said an industry expert surnamed Zhu.

He added that there had already been a number of similar unions. They all broke up in the end because individual operators could hardly afford to neglect their own interests.

The result is the decision to add flights when the market rises. When all the companies act in a similar way, they return to the vicious cycle of price competition.

One thing holiday travelers should be wary of is that they might be bilked of their money by fake ticket sellers. Chen Liangjun noted a few recent cases in which someone bought tickets with other people's identity cards and then asked to have the tickets refunded.

Chen and his people became suspicious and insisted that the money could only be refunded to the ticket users themselves. Their caution resulted from an incident several months ago when nearly 100 people were cheated with fake tickets.

Swindlers bought real tickets and made replicas of them before returning the real tickets. Then they sold the replicas to unsuspecting customers.

"The safest way is to buy tickets from the outlets listed in the Shenzhen Aviation Guide published by Shenzhen Aviation Transportation Association," said Catherine Nie, secretary general of the association.

(Shenzhen Daily April 22, 2005)