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'We will be independent of our investments from VCs by early 2009'

Stuart Crighton, now CEO of Cleartrip.com, talks about the evolution of the OTA market, how his company is nearing profitability and exploring newer revenue sources. By Chetan Kapoor

How has the international booking engine fared since its launch in late July?

We realised that the market for international bookings was generally small with high transaction volume though the competition had international bookings for a long time. Rolling out our new products was a big step as we have been rather conservative and wanted to make it attractive in terms of route selection, access to certain carriers, pricing, etc. From a development and partnership perspective, we are very happy with it and the response has been better than expected. Our average transactions are between 120-180 segments per day, which has been all organic with no campaigning, and the product is leveraging on the existing customers.

The international product needs innovation and will take at least six months before it makes a healthier contribution to overall revenues.

According to you, how are the OTAs evolving with reduced air transactions these days?

The OTA product is obtaining a lot more complex utilities and all are building strong non-air products and exploring different products to do that. Our position right now is to address all problems in the hotels segment and this is where deals like TripAdvisor, which gave us a million reviews overnight, added to the transparency we provide. We have witnessed 25-30 per cent growth in bookings due to this. However, hotels are a long race and not a sprint and there are real problems such as access to inventory and pricing. Overall, occupancy has been hit quite hard because of the airlines, which is why this quarter is important for us and we are focusing on putting in the right content and allocation and will support it with lots of customer optimisation.

What changes do you foresee in a zero per cent commission era?

We support the transaction fee. The idea of air commissions was to have a cash flow and not profit-making. If the numbers in the discussion are right, we believe that this is fair as it will give us resources, profits, better choices and products.

What is going to be your immediate focus?

From November, we are looking at increasing revenue opportunities to gain profitability by early 2009, in all segments including rail. Our goal is not to thereafter merge or enter a partnership, but to continue to grow independent of our investments from VCs. We believe that the next 18-24 months would be a tipping point in the OTA market.

Could you tell us more about the B2B product that is currently being developed?

The B2B space is crowded and messy and economics of models are changing. We are currently having eight live pilots on the distribution side and every part of our technology is API-enabled, and our CRM technology, content, inventory are available from end-to-end to everyone. With two and a half years of investment in product and technology we can now offer our consumers and partners benefits. B2B products must be clear about value proposition - products, content, new revenue opportunities - and is about to witness a turmoil with cash flow issues. The question everyone is asking today is how to make the desk staff more productive in the zero per cent era and at the same time serve from 10 to 20 people a day. Consumers too want things quicker and our approach is to make it productive which in the long term will have a good price proposition.