iXiGO.com continues to grow web-sales for Jet Airways, JetLite, Kingfisher
Leading Travel Search Engine Supports Airlines By Growing Direct Bookings
-- iXiGO.com, India’s fastest growing travel searchengine today announced that it will continue working with Jet Airways, JetLite& Kingfisher despite travel agents (both online and offline) across thecountry stopping the sale of Jet Airways & JetLite tickets during the last4 days.
In the aftermath of what has been one of themost eventful periods for airlines in India, airlines adopted a zero commissionregime on November 1, whereby travel agents added a transaction fee to theairlines’ own fare and charged it to the end-consumer. This spiked airfares andon December 1, airlines decided not to add this transaction fee any more,causing concern to travel agents eager to return to the commission regime. Theagents collectively stopped selling tickets of certain airlines before finally settlingtoday on a lower commission structure of 3%, down from the 5%.
Speaking on these developments, Aloke Bajpai,Founder-CEO, iXiGO.com said – “Zero commission regimes exist in many leadingmarkets globally and travel agents there have evolved to a service-fee model.In the current period of slow economic growth, the survival of the airlineindustry is a collective responsibility for all of us. iXiGO.com will supportairlines in becoming more self-sufficient by driving a larger percentage oftraffic directly to their own site, and effectively decrease their dependencyon indirect distribution channels”
Nitin Gurha, VP - Travel Partnerships, added– “Travel agencies would lose customers if their favorite airline ticket is nolonger available with them or available for less on the airline site. Customersare becoming aware of these market nuances and ask numerous questions fromtheir travel agencies before they end up buying; no one wants to pay more.Consumers can search and book across all airlines on iXiGO.com, even the onespotentially not available with their travel agents. In such an environment,innovative partnerships such as the one we have entered with TravelGuru canallow mid-to-large sized Travel Agents to transition to the travel search modeland to offer a competitive airfare search product to their consumers. It givesthem a world-class product with an unbiased display of all airlines, as well asa surer way of discovering the very best air fares available in real time.”
iXiGO.com, launched in June 2007, has grownexponentially in the last 12 months. Its airline-friendly business model hasintroduced a paradigm-shift in travel bookings and has made it India’s leadingtravel search engine, enabling bookings directly on travel providers’ ownwebsites and helping them market and distribute more effectively on theInternet. As of now, iXiGO.com is one of the most comprehensive and unbiasedairfare search engine in India. In addition to airlines, iXiGO.com searcheshotels across the world and bus routes within India.
Notes to Editor
AboutiXiGO.com:
iXiGO.com ® is India’s leading online travel search engine basedout of Gurgaon. iXiGO searches across multiple airlines,hotels, and bus booking sites and finds the besttravel deals. Launched in mid-2007 by an entrepreneurial team of young IITiansand INSEAD MBAs, iXiGO.com has been recognized by NASSCOM as India’s Top-100Innovator; BusinessToday and WSJ-Mint have named it among India’s hotteststartups for its unique market approach, product usability, and passionatemanagement team. iXiGO is backed by BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-basedseed-investment fund. For more information about iXiGO, visit www.ixigo.com.