The internet is seeing booming growth and the most benefited by this growth has been the e-ticketing and the e-commerce industries where new players are jumping on to the bandwagon to get a piece of the pie.
With almost 100 million tickets being sold online annually the potential of the online travel industry has been noticed by traditional travel major Cox and Kings who plans to launch its very own online portal ezeego1.com this November. Ezeego1.com will be an online travel marketplace for service providers, tour operators and travel agents to sell their products online.
The online travel industry grew at 126 per cent from a base of $295 million in 2005 to $796 in 2006 and as of now it may comprise a mere 2.2 per cent of the domestic travel market, but it is set to grow from $796 million in 2006 to around $2 billion by 2008, according to a recent report by PhoCusWright. In 2007, it is expected to clock a 66 per cent growth rate to be a $1,325 million industry and by 2008, another 51 per cent to be a $2,004 million (around $2 billion) industry.
Looking at these figures its no surprise that Rediff.com recently officially launched (its been around for a while) faresearch.rediff.com along with a feature to book your tickets on GPRS-enabled mobile phones.
And its not only air ticketing the railways had recently tied-up with sify cafe’s have now also tied up with SBI which will provide e-ticketing kiosks at 681 stations, that will inture generate revenue of Rs 10.5 crore annually for SBI, railways is likely to rake in over Rs 60 crore every year.
E-ticketing will be primarily driven by Airline travel as it is the biggest sub-segment in the online travel market which accounts for 80 per cent of the travel industry.
The other e-ticketing which is booming is the movie tickets where websites of multiplexes like fame, pvr, fun cinemas are enjoying the boom. Recently we covered another e-ticketing site known as iticket.in which also provide tickets for events, theatre plays etc. This entertainment industry is another one to watch out as far as e-ticketing is concerned.
Now moving to e-commerce currently this market is worth around Rs 1,100 crore and is expected to touch Rs 2,300 crore in the one year. Looking at this boom Reliance Retail and Future Group (Pantaloon) are building up significant online presence (future group has launched futurebazaar) to compliment their online stores.
One of the biggest problem that i see that these retail giants will face is the brand recall online. I mean you may be reliance or Pantaloon’s offline but online the game is different. Many big brands have online stores but little revenue to show they are just there for the sake of online presence. Branding online will be key to making these e-commerce ventures work.
Given the muscle of Reliance and the hunger for growth of the Future Group, these players are aggresively setting up online channel to tap the fast growing e-commerce pie.
Fabmall Ceo said it right when he mentioned that More than competing with each other, the e-commerce players should figure out how to grow this pie. This means that online shopping needs to be made a common thing which is convenient and comfortable for the users as opposed to physically visiting a store.
