Perry Cantarutti, the Tokyo-based director of planning and distribution planning for Northwest Airlines, was here to decide which agency in Hong Kong would be used to outsource Web development work to for the Asian sites.

'We are a little behind the times here. While we created these local Asian sites a while back, we kind of lost momentum while our competitors have accelerated their Internet plans and we admit that we are playing catch up now,' said Mr Cantarutti.

Northwest's Hong Kong Web site is a pale cousin of the main site. It does not offer online ticketing and is relatively thin on features.

If you are a member of WorldPerks, the airline's loyalty programme, you can check and manage your account from the Web site, but that is about all it does.

In comparison, the US site allows Northwest's frequent flyers to redeem points for free flights online, make online reservations and check the latest status of flights. It also will notify passengers of flight changes through pagers, PCs or mobile phones. It also can be personalised. Such features already are available on rival cathaypacific.com.

Northwest also launched in the US this year a condensed version of its Web site for handheld computers, including Windows CE and Palm OS devices. Travellers with handheld computers can display WorldPerks account information, download flight schedules and are notified of weekly special and discounted fares.

'We fully intend to bring to our Asian sites the tools already available on nwa.com as well as localisation in languages. Additionally, we want to roll out in our Asian sites the same three-clicks-to-anywhere site design so that our sites are easily navigable and comprehensive even for less-savvy Internet users,' he said.

Mr Cantarutti said that while the US site had about 5,000 pages, the company intended to offer only about 500 pages of content to the Asian sites. It will add local content.

He said that about 60 per cent of traffic to nwa.com went either to WorldPerks pages or the online travel-research section.

According to Mr Cantarutti, the company expected to sell more than US$350 million of passenger tickets through nwa.com and redeem more than 100,000 frequent-flyer tickets online.

'We think that the behaviour will be much the same in Asia so our priority is not to bring those features in first,' he said.

Northwest is expected to launch its first improved Asian site - in Singapore - by late December. A new site will be launched every two weeks until the end of March.

Local languages planned are Korean, Japanese, Thai and simplified and traditional Chinese.

While about half of the 6 per cent it recorded in online ticket sales was through online travel retailers such as Expedia.com and Travelocity.com, Mr Cantarutti said the company was not planning to repeat the strategy in Asia.

'Finding online travel retailers as partners is not our priority at this point. We really want to focus on consumers first,' he said.

In a bid to attract customers, Northwest has launched special online fares and bonus miles on its Hong Kong site.

The airline's e-commerce services will be managed by four staff in Japan and two in Hong Kong.