Recap 2009: Online Travel
The year started with some bad news for OTA’s as the economy was still reeling under the pressure of recession and 26/11 shock of 2008. We interviewed Deep Kalra of Makemytrip early this year on his views about the recession driven economy. OTA’s started bolstering non air revenue streams like bus travel as well as train travel and also started looking at ad revenue and alternative payments like cash cards to provide more options to the user to book online for their tickets.
So while ticketing was facing the brunt of the recession hotel bookings seemed still lucrative as Hotels.com launched itself in India. Some OTA’s looked at the franchisee model of expansion to beat the recession while some looked at DTH distribution. There were others who tied up with portals and new players came up with newer models like bidding for travel tickets and there were some who launched chatbots as well.
As the mid year approached and the airlines came under pressure they launched their own OTA in rang de. Post mid year things seemed to improve and OTA’s started launched newer marketing campaigns. This was followed by more DTH distribution, tie ups for travel reviews on IRCTC website and the launch of a new hindi travel portal as well. New travel search engines were also launched by Media companies and existing travel sites got innovative and started looking at weddings as an opportunity.
The big news of the year though was Travelocity buying Travelguru for an undisclosed sum. This was by far the biggest exit in the OTA business in India. There was also some interesting law suits one of which was connected to Makemytrip.com which lost the domain name Oktatabyebye to the Tata group.
All in all 2009 wasn’t the best year for OTA’s as they tried their best to get out of the global slump and ventured into newer non air businesses. As we look forward towards 2010 OTA’s would have to move beyond just ticketing sites and look at delivering wholistic value be it planning travel or holidays for its users or even more.
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Rightly said – A holistic approach to travel, which can add value to the chain from the beginning is needed.
Come on – you guys need to do better analysis than this.
WATBlog sucks bigtime and you are definitely loosing more readers by such amateurish articles.
I know you wont publish this comment.
Raju
Raju – Firstly your comment is published. Secondly we invite you to send us your article on info(at)watblog(dot)com and we shall publish it
We try hard to do good articles and Im sorry if this didnt cut it for you but We shall keep trying our best.
“There was also some interesting law suits one of which was connected to Makemytrip.com which lost the domain name Oktatabyebye to the Tata group.”
MakeMyTrip has not lost the domain name OkTataByeBye.com. We are contesting the ruling by WIPO in court and the matter is sub-judice. The term ‘tata’ is generic and used as a farewell greeting and to claim ownership of the phrase is quite ridiculous.