4. Which airline will be selected?
If it has been agreed that a particular journey will be made by air, the
question of the choice of airline is clearly a crucial one. In the past, many
business travellers did have the choice to make this decision themselves. It
has been a major trend of the last ten years that this has become so in fewer
and fewer cases. As we shall see in Section 2:2:4, during this time more
and more companies have centralised travel purchasing in order to gain
access to corporate discounts from airlines. Such policies narrowed the
choice which the individual traveller could exercise, even if they were not
restricted to using a single airline.