Private air carrier Kingfisher Airlines and wireless transaction services company PayMate have come together to offer flight ticket bookings through short messaging service (SMS).

Kingfisher is the first airline in India to offer customers the facility of “search, book and pay” for flight tickets on a mobile phone without manual intervention, a release stated here on Thursday. The service, FlyBuySMS, works on any mobile handset model and the service requires no registration or application download.

The customer will have to follow a three-step process of search, book and pay for the ticket. They could pay for the ticket by authorising payment via SMS with their PayMate personal identification number. Non-PayMate users can pay securely with their credit card over an automatic interactive voice response call back.

“The SMS-based ticketing service is yet another effort to offer our guests unparalleled convenience and world class reservation facility,” Kingfisher Airlines Chairman Vijay Mallya observed.

PayMate Founder and MD Ajay Adiseshann said the simplicity of using SMS and the convenience of the mobile medium will make it a compelling ticketing channel in the near future.

“Customers will not be limited to internet bookings or bookings via their travel agents,” he said.