CLEARTRIP, the leading online travel booking portal, recently raised $70 million in venture capital and plans to invest up to $12 million in the next two years. After massive success in India and Southeast Asia, the company launched cleartrip.ae, to target the Western and Arab expatriate communities in Gulf countries. More recently its launched customised websites in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. TTN caught up with Jae Hung Kim, the president and head of business development to find out what’s in store:
What brought about the decision to launch customised websites versus a common portal for the region?
The Middle East is a very specific market for each country, be it Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Bahrain and therefore, we wanted to make sure it was localised and customised. This involves not just starting an Arabic site but also identifying the way the product performs and the way people interact. There is a lot of education process involved not just with the simple payment and translation, but also how to transact and make it quick an easy and efficient and also from a content perspective.
Since the launch of our localised sites in the region we are being able to deliver value to our customers, something we will continue to do moving forward.
How has business been on Cleartrip.ae?
Business has been fantastic. We are an online portal, for B2C and B2B services. For the B2C side, we have seen tenfold growth in the last 12 months, with very little marketing. It shows how powerful and important this region is in the world of travel. Besides being a strong hub, source markets like India use this as a hub too and vice versa.
What are the new highlights on the site?
We are very focused on consumers, and their one key area is the payment process. We have worked very hard in delivering a convenient and trustworthy and offer them a one-click booking facility called Expressway. It lets you save your travel details and credit or debit card details securely on your Cleartrip Account or mobile devise and then book all your flights and hotels worldwide with just one click. Speed and ease are the key factors. The entire process will take six seconds from beginning to the end, thus adding tremendous value.
We recently partnered with Visa to offer customers worldwide a fast, secure, easy payment solution.
How can the travel trade take advantage of this new website?
The travel trade will be very interesting. Our focus is to make sure we make travel simple. We have a Cleartrip for business product, which we offer entrepreneurs who can make their own decisions and bookings. It is very powerful tool because of its simplicity. Analytic reporting is important of course, but in this day and age when everyone is looking at cost control, this will allow you to have 15 to 20 per cent savings on your travel budget. With our product, we aim to give control back to the corporates. And that corporate market, we believe is just as big as the leisure market.
Is the competition tough out there?
Anywhere there is growth, a lot of people want to enter that market. It’s critical that you have to have a different creative solution. For us part of it is technology we built from the ground up, and so we think that is important. If you want to make changes and go customised and localised, you have to own the technology. And on top of this, content is extremely important.
Finally, for the region we are very excited. The Middle East is connected to the rest of the world, whether through Emirates, Etihad or Qatar Airways, and I expect a lot more to come.