siliconindia | | November 20178IN MY OPINIONTRAVEL TECHNOLOGY ­ MISSING LINKBy Jay Kantawala, Founder & Partner, WIYO TravelHeadquartered in Mumbai, WIYO Travel is a Travel & Tourism company specializing in the areas of Custom leisure travel, Corporate Travel, MICE, Honeymoons, Experiential Travel, Culinary Travel, Cultural Exploration, Adventure Travel, Wildlife Safaris, and many others.O ver the years, we have seen a lot of changes and development in the travel technology. Once we entered the new millennium, we have seen various Travel/Technology companies coming out with Travel Portals and the growth of online travel agents (OTAs). Over the years, we have seen various companies investing millions into travel technology to get an edge over competition. Initial days, one could only book Air tickets on OTA platforms; this has changed over a period of years. Today, most OTAs offer Booking of Domestic and International air tickets, rail tickets, bus tickets, Hotel Bookings, Car Rentals, Activities and Ready packages. Aspects to customize and create a completely tailor made holiday is missing with all OTAs online and most OTAs and agents offer this service offline. They display ready packages online and to make changes to the same, one needs to call their call center or office to get a customized quote. Getting a custom quote takes anything between few hours to 2-4 days depending on the agent and the complexity of the inquiry. Missing LinkTo take the online platforms to the next level, one needs to create a tool to `create your holiday'. Using this tool, one should be able to start with their flight, add hotels, airport transfers, sightseeing, activities and guide services and get a complete customized package as per clients inputs. The client can re-view the package and later share with family/friends or make changes to suit their pref-erences and re-quirements. Tool to `cre-ate your holiday' will involve cer-tain complex-ities. We have over 200 coun-tries in the world and each coun-try is unique in the way it would function. If we talk of India, we have 29 states and seven union territories, though majority of parameters with regards to hotels would be similar, we have different parameters in vehicle cost, entrance fees, and interstate vehicular taxes where applicable. When we consider creating a backend for several countries, multi-ple parameters will have to be considered to ensure that the platform gives desired results. The Back office operations team can verify the program cre-ated by the user and give the users suggestions in case they feel that the user has planned a wrong itinerary using the tool. Adding to this concept, we also have guides that are a part of travel planning, some prefer a local guide while travelling and some opt to explore on their own. So, if have a Jay Kantawala
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