Travel portal in the wings from Euro-airlines

A group of leading European airlines, headed by British Airways (BA), has confirmed they are to create a travel portal to sell tickets and holidays directly to the users.

Air France, Alitalia, KLM and SwissAir are in the early stages of meetings to draw up proposals for what could be known as the Online Travel Portal.

A spokesman for KLM said: "We have agreed to a feasibility study to see how this sort of Web site for airlines in Europe can be realised. But at this stage no guarantees have been given by any airlines for their participation."

The news comes shortly after BA announced it was to invest £100m in Internet ventures over the next two years. The UK airline will invest the money in extending its Air Miles and ecommerce portal, as well as the 'Online Travel Portal'.

Katherine Bullock, director at Customer Solutions and a specialist on ecommerce in the travel sector, claimed the deal would offer "much needed competition" to online travel sites such as Lastminute.com and e-bookers.com.

She said: "It's the convenience factor especially as airlines move towards electronic ticketing. If you look at the other dot-com travel sites they don't actually issue the tickets, so while it is easy to find the tickets, the process after that is not so smooth.

"The positioning and the branding is good but the execution is the problem, they find it hard to maintain a level of service after the initial sell."

Ashim Pal, analyst at Meta Group, said he hoped the portal would be an improvement on the current online travel sites.

"Travel sites are not good at finding the best fare or answering strange queries, and sites like Lastminute.com are best for the time pressured, but travel sites as a whole are poor. They are the Internet white elephant," he said.