Travel Portal – What can you do to decrease dependency on Airlines Booking based revenue

With news of Air Deccan getting funded by Reliance Capital and Spicejet equity picked up by Tata brought good news and showed faith in indian aviation sector. Though going forward with my earlier post on Travel portal valuations. Things still not change as if prices keep falling the way they are volumes will surely be created but the actual revenue earned in terms of percentage will also decrease.

Now we know portal managers are talking about new strategy for increasing revenue share of hotel reservations. The sale of indian hotels to indians at lower end of spectrum could only workout if they follow a strategy of e-enabling hotels across the spectrum. Well we are surely not talking about higher end 4 star hotels and above category. But the real budget category. Ways to have a go at them

# Buy room inventory like travel agents do directly from hotels. Alternatively if they are creating a b2b network of travel agents being dependent on their portal why not let them manage their inventory online with you. whereas you can access their hotel inventory making larger volumes of hotels across the nation available.

#Creating a server-client hotel management software for hotels where they if accept to use software have to make hotel inventory available online based on X% model.

#Give hotels a free product signup whereas small hotel/resorts can integrate specific to their hotel internet booking engine free of cost (% passed to travel portal also again inventory made available online).

They are couple of ideas which can help travel portals can specifically use for engaging more hotel inventory online. Next post will be on creating tour packages and marketing them effectively using portals.