Leading Indian Online Travel Agent (OTA) Yatra Online has raised $14.5 million in series D round of funding according to a SEC filing. This news was first reported by Techcircle.in According to the SEC disclosure Yatra is raising the capital sum through Series D preferred which is convertible to common stock. Even though Yatra CEO Dhruv Shringi has apparently denied any such fund-raising to Techcircle...

Yatra, one of India’s leading online travel portals has acquired Travelguru, which is the Indian arm of US company, Travelocity. The acquisition of this competitor has definitely made Yatra’s position stronger in the Indian online travel segment. Source: bestmediainfo.com Yatra has received funding from Intel Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Reliance Capital and Valiant Capital Management....

Yesterday, Cleartrip CEO Stuart Crighton and Director Amit Taneja participated (read arrested) in the investigation conducted by ACP Surender Singh, Gurgaon Police. The arrest was made based on a complaint made by Travelocity in December 2009, which accused Cleartrip of stealing data, and in doing so, caused large losses for the company. Though the duo were arrested, they were released immediately...

When was the last time you booked a ticket using one of the online travel portals like MakeMyTrip or Yatra? Even if you think that was long time back, chances are high that you used them at least to check on the prices or ticket availability. That’s because an overwhelming majority of urban Indians do it that way. A new study by Nielsen shows that nearly 80 percent of Indians plan their holidays...

In what seems to be a first of its kind deal (in terms of size – though the actual acquisition price isnt disclosed) in the Indian online travel space Travelocity – the global travel giant has acquired India’s Travelguru.com which is focused on hotel bookings in India and Internationally. Travelocity boasts of annual gross bookings of more than U.S. $10 billion and operates: Travelocity...

The year 2008 can be termed as the year of online travel as this space has seen immense traction all throughout the year. Whether it was launching of discounted travel, expansions, acquisitions, investments, aggregation or even shut down the online travel space has seen it all during this year. It would be an understatement to say that 2008 was an eventful year for online travel. The main players in...

RateGain a Noida based technology company has launched a video and price comparison site for international hotels by the name of hotelly.com. This site was launched in the UK in november and is now launched in India. Currently hotelly aggregates prices from 40 international Online Travel Agents (OTAs) like hotels.com, priceline.com, agoda.com, octopustravel.com, gtahotels.com, hotelclub.com, booking.com,...

Travelguru.com which initially started as a flight booking platform but later repositioned its core focus from Flights to hotel booking has now taken a step futher to ‘cut costs’ and further sharpen its focus on hotel bookings by tying up with iXiGo.com to power it flight search and booking. What kind of tie up is this? iXiGo was earlier in the news for its partnership with NDTV Travels...

Citibank India and travelguru.com have come together to launch TravelRewards.co.in, a travel rewards platform for its cardholders which will earn them reward points and discounts on their spending on hotel and holiday packages booked via travelguru ofcourse. The benefits that a users gets by registering  on Travelrewards.co.in are: Accrual of triple reward points on hotel and holiday package bookings...

Innovations, deals, slowdown, growth, if anyone has been tracking the Online Travel Agents and Portals space lately it is abuzz with news of all kinds. The highs and travails of being one of the few successful business models on the web in India I guess. The online travel segment has been one of the best performing in the e-commerce space in India and has been amongst the fastest growing as well. If...