Online travel portals will have to evolve, was the message from Deep Kalra, CEO of MakeMyTrip at the “Online Travel: Are You Hooked” conference organized by the IAMAI in New Delhi on Friday. The coming year, said Kalra, is going to be for Meta search co’s (like Kayak), though he wondered why no Online Travel Agency (OTA) has yet launched a metasearch. The customer isn’t loyal to the OTA but to the airline, but whether there’s a business model around meta search, only time will tell. On the mobile, he feels that WAP isn’t there yet, and SMS is still more pervasive. Makemytrip has tied up with Paymate for bookings via SMS. Airlines too are becoming intermediaries, responding to the customer demand: the railways is talking about selling hotel reservations online. The suppliers don’t want to lose that race. In the US, the intermediaries are more valuable that the airlines.
Asked about the viability of the hybrid (online+offline) model, Kalra said that it’s the future. Similar to SAIL’s tagline (“we also make steel”), OTA’s will have the “we also sell tickets”; There will be a bunch of value added services related to the travel domain, and while the margins on tickets will below, there will be offerings that give them 10-20 percent. Bus tickets can be a low price, high margin product. Hotels – MakeMyTrip has tied up with 1500 independent properties in India, and they’re going to try and sell these hotels. Depends on what you can give to the customer, he says.
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