iXiGo Launches Hotels 2.0 – While Competition Heats Up In Travel Aggregator Space With Kayak.in
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iXiGo which had first launched the hotel search option earlier this year in april has now upgraded to what they term as hotel 2.0. This new upgrade has many new additions of interesting features along with tying up with more hotel information service providers.
Essentially here is what’s new:
Hotel Chains Search - You can now search for a group of hotel chains (such as Radisson, ITC Sheraton or the Oberois) within a city.
Larger Search Base - With Inasra, Travelguru and HostelWorld added to the search list over 6000+ hotels (from the previous 4200) to search through.
Hotel Reviews – iXiGO has entered into partnerships with HolidayIQ and OKTataByeBye, – two of the leading Indian hotel review sites
City Map Views – With this feature you can now locate where exactly your hotel is located on a detailed city map. Check Screenshot below:
Now with iXiGo funded and Zoomtra backed by SITG (The same company behind Quasar), Mobissimo and ezeego1 the travel aggregator (search) space was relatively less crowded (Check this to see the number of OTA’s!). But now even this space seems to be hotting up with new competition pouring in. As this article states that US based trave search engine Kayak.com will be launching in India a travel search engine at Kayak.in for India and marketing the same in India.
With this competition heating up one of the above player would need to go to market with a mass media strategy before others so that they can have brand recall as a travel aggregator/search engine among the masses. Just like the OTA’s did with TV advertising to gain market share. The only issue is that kind of marketing spend may require one of the above players to raise some serious VC money and I wont be surprised if we hear the funding news sooner rather than later..
What do you feel? What of the above do you think has potential?
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