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Travel portals business slows down
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 17 July 2008, 17:18 IST
Bangalore: The buzz of travel portals is fading. Two years ago - online travel was a sunrise business in India with as many as five large travel portals being launched with a big bang, reported CNBC TV18
In India travel portals like cleartrip.com and makemytrip.com for the past few months is facing a severe slow down of air ticketing. They are down from seven percent in 2001 to five percent in 2005, to possibly zero by October this year.
Sandeep Murthy, Chairman, Cleartrip.com, "We have to now build an Open Travel Alliance or, OTA based on zero percent commissions, which is what we are doing right now. We have a larger focus on our hotel product."
Cleartrip is not alone; leading travel portals like yatra, travelguru and makemytrip are headed the same way. So these companies are coming up with hot deals along with the air tickets. Some of them are free airport transport and even free meal and fuel vouchers to survive.
Meanwhile other players are betting on an offline model to counter this tough time in the business. So online portals offering physical kiosks to provide rail, air and even bus tickets along with discounted holiday packages are being offered just to lure the floating population in malls and highstreets.
