Indian OTAs are purely transactional in nature - what they are missing is the art of 'consultative' selling.
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We earlier covered the launch of Rang7, OTA created by Kingfisher/Spicejet and Indigo airlines that will enable users to buy tickets directly from the site (and help airlines reduce agency/distribution cost). Though there are few concerns we had regarding domain name etc, but assuming that the news is true (it’s also published in all the...
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We earlier covered the launch of Rang7, the OTA from Spicejet, Indigo and Kingfisher. Contrary to the press release (which even had the quote from FIA secretary), one of the industry sources tell us that the airlines have decided to not participate in this venture – so
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Spicejet, IndiGo and Kingfisher have partnered to launch their own OTA (online travel agency), Rang7 (will go live by May 3rd week). Teaming up will help them reduce agency cost (Indian carriers spend close to Rs. 200 Crore in distribution
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FlightRaja (now Via) co-founder, Niranjan Gupta has launched MagicRooms, a B2B hotel aggregator that distributes the inventory of hotels across travel agents as well as online channels. MagicRooms enables hotel partners to distribute parity rate over different sales channels and acts as an interface to upload/manage their inventory. Travel agents can logon to magicrooms system and...
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We conduct quiz on twitter (follow us) everyday @ 2 PM and the same enthusiasm has now percolated to pluGGd.in. So today’s quiz question – Who acquired Tripmela? To give you some context, Tripmela was a deal sourcing site and after few months back, put itself up for auction on eBay – the company, as we...
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1027 votes and the winner of India’s Most Trusted Travel Booking Site poll is..
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800 votes so far!! Well, like I mentioned earlier, we extended the poll deadline and the poll ends on March 5th. Few details to keep in mind: Several of the travel companies have called/mailed me asking how to vote/poll etc etc. If you have voted once, you can’t vote again (system tracks IP address). We aren’t counting comments...
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Travelyaari is a newly launched travel booking site (currently has data for Western India primarily) and before you ask – why another OTA, here is the big difference /claimed USP:? Unlike other OTAs, TravelYaari works on live inventory – not on quota booking. They work closely with operators, who use their platform to manage their...
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Image via Wikipedia As mentioned earlier, travel agents stopped selling Jet Airways ticket and post discussion with the association, Jet has decided to pay 3% commission to agents (on the gross fare of international and domestic tickets). Earlier, 5% commission was based on base fare, and 3% of gross fare will be more friendly to operators. The...
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OTAs across the country have stopped selling Jet Airways ticket protesting against the zero commission/erosion of transaction fee. Esesntially, over 2500 travel agents (including OTAs) have stopped showing results from Jet Airways on their site – and this is where iXIGo sees an opportunity to position itself as a neutral player (with no specific alignment...
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iXiGo has partnered with Travelguru to power their flight search. Travelers using Travelguru’s flight search functionality will be able to compare offers from airlines, and book them directly on airline sites by clicking on links on the results page. This will allow travelers to
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Indian Railways opened up it’s ticket booking APIs a few weeks back and here are some fine prints that you need to understand: Must have minimum annual turnover (i.e. Gross transaction value) of Rs.5 crore in last financial year from Travel business. The OTA will be required to submit a one time non refundable deposit of...
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Egencia, Expedia’s corporate travel arm has launched it’s corporate travel management service in India. Egencia offers local businesses in India online access to an extensive range of reports, allowing travel managers to analyze business travel information on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Egencia India will help Indian businesses and
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ClearTrip has shared some interesting stats and growth projections – the company achieved a turnover of Rs 650 crore last fiscal year and is targeting Rs 850-900 crore in 2008-09. The site receives 1.5-1.75 lakh visits a day – (30-35% are UUs, 15-20% of them are first-timers) 15-20% of them are
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ClearTrip has launched train booking and is the first OTA to offer this service. The site is neatly done (of all the web players, it won’t be wrong to say that CT has the best UI) and what’s really commendable is the presentation of information. For instance: A single search provides users with train fares,
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India Post has turned into a major distribution channel for ticketing and has launched centralized reservation system (CRS) for all modes of travel like Air, Rail, Bus and Hotel / Car reservations with a focus to make all forms of travel available in a single platform. The current launch covers 150 post offices...
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iXiGo has launched bus booking enabling search, comparison and booking of bus tickets from multiple bus operators and bus booking sites in India. iXiGo’s, in partnership with Ticketvala, redBus and TicketGoose aggregates private bus operators spread over 500 towns and across 2300 routes. The indian travel/OTA industry is under a serious threat as commission per ticket,...
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90di (profiled earlier) has launched a natural language based travel search that accepts free text queries like “delhi to bangalore on 15th september 2008 by train” or “bangalore to kolkata on 05/09/2008″. This surely is an interesting twist to the general form based search (which they have too) and is far more intuitive than...
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Very recently, I covered how Indian OTAs are under a serious threat because of the vanishing commission from flight booking. It seems ClearTrip is realizing this fast and is now displaying following message on it’s site: Cleartrip supports India’s offline travel agents and stands by them in their time of need. Screenshot: Aren’t these online portals ’supposed’...
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