KUALA LUMPUR (March 4): AirAsia has decided to permanently withdraw sales of its flights from Traveloka. AirAsia claimed that its decision followed the unexplained disappearance of AirAsia Indonesia flights from the online travel agent for the second time in the past two weeks.

In a statement today, low-cost carrier AirAsia said the withdrawal covers all flight routes across the AirAsia network.

AirAsia Indonesia president director Dendy Kurniawan claimed in the statement: “The omission of our flights has certainly hurt cooperation between AirAsia and Traveloka. Traveloka has not acted in good faith. They have refused to provide an official explanation despite our repeated attempts to seek their clarification.

"The exclusion of several AirAsia Indonesia flights by Traveloka is a clear display of preferential treatment and an act of favouritism. We observed through social media messages how customers who enquired about the unavailability of AirAsia flights were recommended by Traveloka to book with other airlines instead. Therefore, in solidarity, AirAsia Group withdraws sales of all of its flights from Traveloka effective immediately,” Dendy said.

AirAsia's statement alleged that its flights first disappeared from Traveloka on Feb 14-17 2019, coinciding with AirAsia’s network-wide system upgrade on Feb 16 2019. AirAsia alleged that Traveloka had cited the 13-hour system downtime as the reason for AirAsia flights disappearing from their website in response to queries from customers.

AirAsia claimed that its flights disappeared from Traveloka for a second time on Saturday (March 2) without clarification, well after the successful system upgrade by AirAsia.

Dendy said: “Competition should be free and fair to ensure consumers benefit from the best deals. We should not let monopolies kill competition at the expense of the travelling public.”

At the time of writing this theedgemarkets.com report, Traveloka had not issued a statement in response to AirAsia's allegations.