iXiGO partners with Travel Guru; enables shift from agency to search

It gives us great pride today to announce a very important, and exemplary, partnership.

iXiGO has partnered with TravelGuru to empower their flight search/booking with our travel engine. What this means is essentially all of TravelGuru's searches will be powered by the fast, smart and friendly search engine that iXiGO is known for.

This is the first time anywhere in the world, that an Online Travel Agency (OTA for short) has piggybacked on a travel search engine to enable searching and booking of airline tickets from its site. This is a defining moment because it shows that search-based models can potentially displace and disrupt agency-models. This not only boosts the growing dominance of the travel search model, but also shows that increasingly OTAs and travel search engines will need to work together to deliver higher value to both travel suppliers and their customers.

It's time to emphasize the three-pronged savings that travel providers (airlines), customers and travel agents can maximise by embracing the travel search model.

This model is very important to the airlines during a recession. Travel providers (airlines) have to find an innovative way to cut their costs and also make sure their distribution and marketing channels can drive qualified bookings at a low per-booking spend. This would require them to realign their internet web strategy in order to incentivize direct-online vs. intermediaries. iXiGO plays a dominant role in this endeavor in redirecting qualified traffic to the airline's own website and letting them own the customers directly. This eliminates the cost of maintaining a middle man to handle transactions, whether that is a GDS or a travel agent. It also ensures that the airline develops recall and stickiness for its own website for the future.

This would certainly be cheaper to the customers as well, who would have otherwise been forced to pay a service fee or transaction fee which travel agents levy on top of fares that the airlines charge. Since commissions are no more paid from November, in order to be profitable, agencies did not have any choice but to charge their customers this fee in order to make a profitable transaction. With the search model, travel agents can be sure of charging their customers the lowest possible fares while allowing them to retain a direct relationship with the airline in order to gain from the better and more direct customer service.

And last but not the least, online travel agents such as TravelGuru can now embrace the search model and drastically reduce operationally intensive processes and costs - thereby having a leaner operation without requiring customer service for flights - a really sensible move for them to maximize their profits.

TravelGuru has taken the bold step of creating the first hybrid model in India of offering travel search to their consumers and iXiGO is proud to be the leader in the industry enabling this service.

If you are an online travel agent who wishes to move to the search model, write to us today !