Online travel has been a really bitterly fought segment with tonnes of funded players and many of them having more money than they need. With so many options to buy tickets Travel aggregators have come to fore and have got funding themselves. And now even portals like Ibibo has jumped on to the travel bandwagon. Ibibo which started as a blogging platform then added social networking and then acquired two web 2.0 startups and then launched dwaar which was into local search and also added familyone which was a family social network which we also questioned about the same to the CEO of Ibibo Mr.Ashish Kashyap on WATShow has been on a web services launching spree.

It seems Dwaar is opening the doors to a travel search tool which means its directly locking horns with the likes of the recently funded iXiGo and Smile Interactive Group owned Zoomtra both of whom are travel search engines.

Dwaar has launched with all four search options i.e. Air, Rail, Bus and Hotel. Even cleartrip had recently launched rail search and the reason given by Hrush Bhatt Co-Founder Cleartrip was that it was a user requested feature.

All in all it does seem that the travel market online is moving towards aggregators while the OTA’s are moving to reach out to the Offline world whether thats by taking huge funding or by acquiring corporate travel companies. One such instance in the news is about Yatra.com looking to acquire the corporate travel business of Kuoni Travels.As more and more OTA’s look Offline for scale the online travel game seems to be moving towards aggregators who can fetch the best price.

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