Percept Knorgin, the digital arm of Percept Holdings has launched their second online media property called ChalBabaChal.com. It is a travel search website, rather another travel search website to go along with the likes of Ixigo, Sprice, Kayak, etc. Percept Knorigin claims that ChalBabaChal.com is capable of searching details of about nine lakh hotels, across 20,000 destinations in 118 countries.
This is their second media property after Cinecurry.com, which they had launched in December last year. And news has it that they are looking at launching two more sites soon in the education and automobile niches.
When they launched cinecurry.com, it seemed a perfect foil for their offline work considering Percept’s movie interests, in fact the site’s launch coincided with the promotion of their animated movie Jumbo. However, chalbabachal.com seems an attempt (or an excuse) to pitch Adchakra – their ad network, better to potential advertisers.
Online travel is amongst the few niches that has worked in India, and therefore is ultra competitive. Not only do we have online travel agencies, but the niche they this site is in – the meta search niche also has a lot of players. That of course means it is easy to pitch the potential of the niche to advertisers online making it an essential bait for ad networks to own. It somehow seems obvious that the only motive with this move is to get advertisers on board selling this site and then using their inventory elsewhere.
More reason to believe this, is Viraj Malik’s statement in their release, “We are eyeing to earn additional revenue by creating our own online properties. Although the revenue will not be significant from our own online properties for the next two years, but the sites created by us will help the company to feed the ad inventory we will get for AdChakra.”
So while other travel search sites seems to bank a lot more on commissions and partnerships with airlines and hotels, chalbabachal will probably look more at garnering ad revenues (even though they have the above revenue options as well).
But can that work?
Like I said the competition in the niche is immense. For this site and their business model to work, they will need to garner a lot of traffic and perhaps become the defacto travel search site. Now for that to happen there has to be a significant pull, not necessarily a USP but something drastically different from what others offer. From what I see on the site and what’s been described elsewhere, I don’t quite see any such feature. In fact there are reports that the site doesn’t quite match up to the best deals that some of the other players in the niche provided. So how exactly is Percept planning to crack this market in terms of traffic is an important question, that will perhaps decide its fate as well.
On the other hand the news that Airlines are coming together to form their own agency, might work to their advantage as a commission based model might not really click in the future (speculation).
For the time being though, it doesn’t appeal enough.
