Former Chief Technology Officer of Snapdeal, Amitabh Misra, plan to bring his e-commerce place experience to his newly planned travel portal Go Fro which would cater to leisure travellers and offer international holiday packages to travellers.

“Building a services marketplace for leisure travel is way harder than building a marketplace for physical goods since it is highly complex. Supporting such platforms needs much more complex technology,” said Misra. The former technology officer had been working in a stealth mode on this project from his newly found start-up Bona Vita Technologies.

The portal covers six destinations- Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Mauritius and Dubai and has plans to pan out to more than 50 destinations that rule the leisure travel market by 90% according to Misra.

Go Fro currently comprises of about 70 individuals who are mainly engineers and plans to aggregate the most fragmented vertical in travel sector; leisure travelling.

The portal integrates other features like live assistance for itineraries apart from offering visa and foreign exchange. MakeMyTrip owns majority stakes in Go Fro and had made an initial investment of $5 million last year.

“We are not actively looking at funding right now. But for growth, we will start looking at it three-four months later,” Misra said, adding that funding would completely depend on how well does the portal pick and the traction it gets.

The company would roll out a companion app around the end of this month which would help the traveller through the remaining of the trip. The company would also have a data analytics- driven tool to suggest interesting activities during the traveller’s stay at the destination.

Source: The Hindu Business Line

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Earlier today Snapdeal announced integrating inventories for redBus, Zomato and Cleartrip on its mobile app. This will enable the users to book bus tickets, hotels, flight tickets and order food directly from the application. Snapdeal primarily focuses on E-Commerce and is lining up various segments to expand its reaches.The E-Commerce giant has taken this step as a measure to expand its footprint amongst travellers.

This association gives Cleartrip, Zomato and redBus access to Snapdeal’s user base. The Snapdeal app has a large number of downloads on Google Play Store and with this move, the partner brands will be able to reach those users while saving on ad spends. The travel portals tend to this move to be positive as it provides them an extra booking channel on the run. In return, Snapdeal will earn a commission on each booking made through its platform. Air ticket is a gross merchandise value (GMV) category while food ordering is a high-frequency category. This move will create a lot of traction on the app, as for all the participants; they will have a real-time customer base. Moreover with the kind of offers Snapdeal rolls out, the travel industry is going to be taken by storm if ever they decide to include these players in the discount segment.

Snapdeal rival, Paytm, is also building a travel marketplace on its platform. The Alibaba-backed company had started selling hotels and bus tickets on the platform a few months back.

This is a highly anticipated step in breaking barriers and going that ‘extra mile’ with redBus, Cleartrip and Zomato.

Source: Economic Times.

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