Travel Portal Business Model India

If you look at the travel portal market in india. Most of the providers are IT or VC backed companies entering the segment. Although we do hear one off annoucement of Travel companies like thomas cook, STIC travels etc comming up with an online strategy. Most of the people entering the segment is based on hype created around the business and volumes without a study on nuisances of business.

With more and more heavy weight businesses making the le creme of travel business in india it doesnt make any sense for entering the segment at 15th or 20th position only if

#Existing IATA travel agent and launching a travel portal will help with drawing value to brand name

# Look at setting up seperate 5 member team to create out reach strategy

# got 5-10 crore advertising spend budget

#Looking at 3-5 years portal strategy with defined niche rather than just running after Domestic or International segment

#can forsee revenue volumes with just air tickets contributing 3o-40%.

If you feel above is you then boom you have a travel model which can surely give yatra or travel guru of today run for their money. Though its advised for travel agents to start taking advantage of the online model so that even if their existing customers start using it. You wont loose out to other online reservation engines.

Options : Abacus, Amadeus, Galileo

Till now amadeus has been really impressive they were very quick to respond. Still havent heard from abacus.  according to amadeus they are powering most of the travel portals in india. Going from indiatimes > travel to yatra.  They have reasonable set of tools which can let you get your site online.  The portal easily gets integrated to agents BSP so no issues of keeping track of PNR’s being generated. Secondly with E-tickets becoming 100% mode of delivery from Dec 2007. Scenario will be much in favour of agents using travel software like ones provided by amadeus or FQ people.

Online DVD Rental India – Finally good news for you!!!!

when most of the people read this news in economic times about Nimbus looking at blockbuster(One of the worlds biggest DVD rental store chain) as potential partner the blogs covering them talked about trouble for online DVD rental Model and how it will make life difficult. But then i thought most of the negative for Online DVD rental will be negated by offline dvd rental model as with easier local/international content availability on rent people are less to buy/rent pirated copies.

Secondly with Metro’s going for change in how cable TV network providers have to make CAS (conditional access) or Set top box necessary for every cable tv viewer. This will also help in reducing piracy.

DTH strategy to only offer 2-3 movies per week that also the one which have done TV Premiere is also in favor of DVD rental model.

In terms of distribution network model. There is no shame in including reliance webworld or Sify I-Ways in business strategy as drop box/pickup facility can be created for ordered movies as another negative point lot of people talked about was dependency of movies getting delivered by courier people. If lets say you ordered a movie and you are not at home till late. Your movie wont get delivered instant if you would like you can pick it up on way from a sify/reliance web world in your locality. Also a franchise model for sorting dvds and distributing them locally can work out for online dvd rental companies to gain market share. why bring all movies to central city library. If lets say a franchisee in south Delhi is responsible for collection/delivery of all movies locally. if an order from south delhi can be furnished from returned item with him why make inventory come back to master location for re-sorting and order dispatch. This way local level penetration will also increase for DVD rental companies and help create revenue for local level advertising with local distribution/management partner.

Tarladalal Vs Sanjeev Kapoor – Online Reciepe which portal is better for indian cooking

If you do a usability testing of both the sites Tarladalal.com people are reading my blog. Their site is not only evolving day by day with addition of new data and better data mining tools implemented on the site. On the other hand sanjeevkapoor.com looks like an attemp to earn from the brand name great chef has an playing on pure e-commerce play of selling ingridents and cookbooks online.

Though both the sites have users contributed reciepes. There is still scope for improvement for increasing user collabration. example forum for people to discuss on improving the reciepes. Tips for first time cooks and list of ingridents they should have if setting up a kitchen. I remember my out of college bachelor days when first time i decided to start cooking at home rather than being dependent on Mcdonalds and chinese takeaway. I went into local super market and did shopping worth 120$ which was pretty much waste as was working on basic idea on shelf life of items and their storage technique. As these sites are being accessed by lot of newcomers they should also provide basic information for new commers. Now i know 200$ worth of grocery shopping is good enough for whole month of cooking at home. But it would have surely helped in first 3-4 months when cooking was restricted to major indian dishes like butter chicken, dal makhni and lot of time was spent online getting the reciepes right and rest on phone taking instructions from india.

Getting back to the sites. Their is no dearth of information both the sites can provide. But better indexability can improve/help people discover and cherish the knowledge being delivered by these great chefs.