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iXiGO.com, India’s fastest growing travel search engine today announced that it will continue working with Jet Airways, JetLite & Kingfisher despite travel agents (both online and offline) across the country stopping the sale of Jet Airways & JetLite tickets during the last 4 days.
In the aftermath of what has been one of the most eventful periods for airlines in India, airlines adopted a zero commission regime on November 1, whereby travel agents added a transaction fee to the airlines’ own fare and charged it to the end-consumer. This spiked airfares and on December 1, airlines decided not to add this transaction fee any more, causing concern to travel agents eager to return to the commission regime. The agents collectively stopped selling tickets of certain airlines before finally settling today on a lower commission structure of 3%, down from the 5%.
Speaking on these developments, Aloke Bajpai, Founder-CEO, iXiGO.com said – “Zero commission regimes exist in many leading markets globally and travel agents there have evolved to a service-fee model. In the current period of slow economic growth, the survival of the airline industry is a collective responsibility for all of us. iXiGO.com will support airlines in becoming more self-sufficient by driving a larger percentage of traffic directly to their own site, and effectively decrease their dependency on indirect distribution channels”.
Nitin Gurha, VP - Travel Partnerships, added – “Travel agencies would lose customers if their favorite airline ticket is no longer available with them or available for less on the airline site. Customers are becoming aware of these market nuances and ask numerous questions from their travel agencies before they end up buying; no one wants to pay more. Consumers can search and book across all airlines on iXiGO.com, even the ones potentially not available with their travel agents. In such an environment, innovative partnerships such as the one we have entered with TravelGuru can allow mid-to-large sized Travel Agents to transition to the travel search model and to offer a competitive airfare search product to their consumers. It gives them a world-class product with an unbiased display of all airlines, as well as a surer way of discovering the very best air fares available in real time.”
iXiGO.com, launched in June 2007, has grown exponentially in the last 12 months. Its airline-friendly business model has introduced a paradigm-shift in travel bookings and has made it India’s leading travel search engine, enabling bookings directly on travel providers’ own websites and helping them market and distribute more effectively on the Internet. As of now, iXiGO.com is one of the most comprehensive and unbiased airfare search engine in India. In addition to airlines, iXiGO.com searches hotels across the world and bus routes within India.
About iXiGO.com
iXiGO.com ® is India’s leading online travel search engine based out of Gurgaon. iXiGO searches across multiple airlines, hotels, and bus booking sites and finds the best travel deals. Launched in mid-2007 by an entrepreneurial team of young IITians and INSEAD MBAs, iXiGO.com has been recognized by NASSCOM as India’s Top-100 Innovator; BusinessToday and WSJ-Mint have named it among India’s hottest startups for its unique market approach, product usability, and passionate management team. iXiGO is backed by BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-based seed-investment fund.
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