Yet another Travel related Investment - Travelmasti.com
Today’s headlines is that Times of India group has invested/acquired some stake(not yet disclosed) in another Indian travel site TravelMasti.com . May be I am new to this, or I just dont get this. Just few days back BCCL(Times owner) had acquired some stake in another Indian travel portal HolidayIQ.com, inspite of having their own IndiaTimes Travel channel on their prime property Indiatimes.com
How many Travel sites does one company need to have to make it big ? 1, 2, 3 how many, do you have an answer ? May be BCCL management itself doesnt know and hence they are trying to get into bed with any and everyone. I wish I could also launch a Travel related site for India and then someone would invest in me too. Yup, see there is the mentality, me too, me too.
How many Travel sites for India exist, there is Yatra, Cleartrip, Aarzoo, Makemytrip, Kayak, Travelocity, BookitOnline, even Indiatimes has their own travel booking engines, then there is Sify, Rediff, Yahoo and even Sulekha has jumped into this, whats going on here guys ? Do we even have these many travellers who access internet at the same time to book tickets ? My question again, do these guys do any survey before they get into this business, I dont know.
I am sure within few weeks we will hear Reliance also getting into this business and then will follow Web18/TV18 group. This is going nuts.
-Indian Wizard
Yeah, that is true. As you say, Indiatimes Travel and Travelmasti are both regular travel agents selling flights, hotels etc. So it seems to be a duplicate investment. I checked up all of these sites. Looks like HolidayIQ is different from the others. HolidayIQ has a lot of information from actual users and does not seem to offer any direct bookings - their site says they offer Intelligent Holiday Planning. So, looks like that is media kind of business & possibly Times of India sees some synergy with their main media business.
Actually, I found a new travel search engine for India, iXiGO, that I find to be the coolest. It’s the only one that allows me to book directly on airline sites and shows all prices inclusive of taxes and fees. You can try it at www.ixigo.com
I wrote a rather long comment on Alootechie when this came out. To summarize it, i really dont see the point. Indiatimes travel had all the resources of the TOI group and they still did not manage to really stand out, i dont see how its going to be different with travelmasti…. unless this is TOI’s first steps towards buying out all travel sites that exist and ensure that irrespective of where a person lands up..its theirs
ya.. this would be interesting to see how the alliance works… BCCL still haven’t been able to make a mark in Indian Travel Trade - domestic / outbound whatever.
But most interesting thing that Indian Travel Trade these days seeing in such occurences is M&A, quite contrary to the scenario 3yrs ago when fragmentation was dominant..