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Business News/ Companies / Building a meta-search engine for travel needs
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Building a meta-search engine for travel needs

Travel marketplace ixigo.com aggregates content, deals on travel, lets business owners list andsell inventory, generate leads

Ixigo co-founders Rajnish Kumar (left) and Aloke Bajpai. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Ixigo co-founders Rajnish Kumar (left) and Aloke Bajpai. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar landed a job in Nice, France, with Amadeus, a travel technology firm, after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. During their stay in Nice, they travelled across Europe. But planning for their trips meant having to visit travel websites over and over again to compare fares, rates and inventories.

It was the trigger which gave birth to ixigo.com, a travel search engine that offers solutions for all travel needs. “We figured out that if one website could aggregate and find the best deals, no matter which site you were on, it would save a lot of time and money," said Bajpai, chief executive officer and co-founder, ixigo.com.

After moving back to India in 2006, co-founders Bajpai and Kumar found two strong trends: fragmentation among intermediaries and suppliers; and demand for value and low fares from consumers.

Over time, ixigo.com has evolved from being a meta-search engine for travel to a mobile travel marketplace where travel business owners can list inventory and start selling and generating leads for business. The service is available on iOS and Android as well as on the website.

“We aggregate travel information, deals, real-time fares and availability, content and reviews from over 150 different websites and apps. When you make a flight, hotel, package or cab search on ixigo.com, we search across all major apps and websites to find the best deals and show it in a neat, easy-to-use interface for travellers to compare and shop with more confidence and information," said Kumar.

Users can click on their choice and will be taken to a deep-link on the provider’s website and app, where they can make the booking with only a couple of more clicks. “We help travellers make smarter travel buying decisions and save them time and money," said Kumar.

The parent company, Le Travenues Technology Pvt. Ltd, started in early 2007, launched ixigo.com as an airline meta-search engine in June 2007. Though the site was able to find the best fares across airline websites and travel portals within a few seconds, it took a bit longer to convince partners to work commercially with the company and build a solid business model around the product.

By September 2007, the company had concluded its first few commercial deals. “Within a few months, we were at 100,000 users per month purely by word of mouth," said Bajpai. Over time, the company added bookings for hotels, buses and trains, and by 2010, it had touched 1 million users per month. In 2010, it launched mobile apps.

“By 2013, it became clear that to win India, we needed to win on mobile, so we started investing our energy in building the best mobile experiences for our users," said Kumar. The company launched six different apps on Android, each solving a unique use case.

For example, one of the apps, the PNR app for train bookings, would pick up trips automatically from PNR text messages on a phone and start tracking delays, cancellations and wait-list confirmations. “Our train app became the fastest growing Android app in the travel category," said Kumar.

The company in 2007 raised $100,000 from angel investors. “We raised just under $1 million from BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-based seed investment fund, across 2008 and 2009. In 2011, SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip invested in our business and bought out our existing investors and angels in a deal value of $18.5 million," said Bajpai. In 2015, the company raised more money from smartphone manufacturer Micromax.

Ixigo.com won an mBillionth award in 2015 in the travel and tourism category. Bajpai claims that one of the big differentiators and a big focus area for the company has been content. “There is a dearth of good quality local content about places to visit, things to do and destinations in India," he added.

Around 90% of the users for ixigo.com are from India, and the rest are largely non-resident Indians from the US, Europe, South-East Asia and Africa.

Mint has a strategic partnership with Digital Empowerment Foundation, which hosts the mBillionth and Manthan awards.

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Published: 27 Oct 2015, 12:11 AM IST
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