Technology developed by a Dublin-based software company is enabling millions of Indian travellers to buy flights and reserve hotels, a market estimated to be worth US$40bn.
India’s first online travel services company Yatra is using a fully integrated travel solution supplied by Dublin-based OpenJaw Technologies.
The technology enables Indian travellers to search, compare and reserve the best flight and hotel deals.
“The complexity in procuring travel products from a myriad of diverse suppliers and distributing them either individually or packaged to a multi-cultural, multi-lingual marketplace is a huge challenge for today’s online travel businesses such as Yatra,” said John McQuillan, CEO of OpenJaw Technologies.
“Basing our systems on XML technology enables us to reduce this complexity and provide an easier, more open connectivity between these businesses and their suppliers and business partners.”
Yatra is using OpenJaw’s XML-based online distribution platform xDistributor which allows Yatra to quickly and easily update business rules to react to changing market conditions and to enhance the traveller’s buying experience.
The Indian company is also using OpenJaw’s hotel content and inventory management system xHotel to centrally manage hotel descriptive content, negotiated rates and inventory allocations for all their hotel suppliers.
“The Indian travel market is enormous and extremely fragmented, making it difficult for Indian travellers to find and compare the best flight and hotel deals and book them online,” said Manish Amin, Yatra CTO and co-founder.
Yatra is the first online travel services company to meet the rapidly growing needs of the current boom in Indian business and leisure travel, which is estimated to reach US$40bn in 2006, growing to US$50bn in 2009.
“Yatra now satisfies this need by bringing together all the major Indian travel suppliers under the umbrella of a single website. We won’t stop here; we will continually be enhancing our services and also offering international reservations as part of our online service,” Amin said.
By John Kennedy
