BENGALURU: Flipkart, the e-commerce gaint has now decided to dive into Air and Train Ticketing business with partnership with MakeMyTrip.com. The online retailer giant is pushing into other services as part of its efforts to grow into a one stop shop for a range of different offerings by the end of this year. Customers now will be able to book air and rail tickets from the Flipkart platform, reports Economic Times.
According to statistics, Indian e-commerce industry revenue is generated predominantly by online travel bookings. In this context, MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Cleartrip have big shares in the industry when it comes to online booking but MakeMyTrip.com is the current market leader in online booking. Airline bookings dominate the e-commerce travel market with half of the revenue generated by airline bookings. Travel bookings, utility payments, mobile recharges and mobile wallets form a big chunk of online e-commerce revenue.
So now it all makes sense when the biggest retailer and biggest travel agent join hands to make their business ever larger as well as helping more and more customers online. Amazon also in March signed a two year deal with the IRCTC for being the railway ticket platform because most of the Indian population travels through trains more often than airlines. However in case of Flipkart, it wants to make its portal as a big shopping mall within itself.
Snapdeal too bought online Mobile recharge platform ‘Freecharge’, to integrate its existing services with mobile recharges, bill payment services and many more. Flipkart hopes that this new merger of services with MakeMyTrip will turn into a lottery ticket soon. Though this is a great deal for Flipkart, for MakeMyTrip that may mean eating into a large share of its profits, would it mind Flipkart enjoying a little share of it? This September, we will know once and for all.
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