Tradebytes

Ticketvala.com to work with travel trade

Chetan Kapoor - Mumbai

With a view to increase sales, Ticketvala.com, an online booking engine dedicated to bus transportation, has started working with the travel trade. Haranath Lokanadham, its president and CEO, said, "We have a dedicated sales team working with them on field. The agent now has to just log in to the website through a simple authentication process that will allow him to book bus tickets online with us."

Completing a year of operations this month, the portal now has 400 operators and six offices. It was recently revamped and also incorporated the option of mobile ticketing. Lokanadham remarked, "The approach has usually been to download a programme for mobile ticketing. However we haven't taken that route since it is a small slice of the market. Instead we focused on resolving issues by providing an option of buying tickets through our partner channels - Airtel and Oxicash. Already 15-20 per cent of our tickets are m-tickets as a lot of people do not have printers."

When questioned about incorporating other modes of surface transportation including the rail, he said that though it is open to IRCTC, the primary focus is still on bus ticketing. The portal now plans on consolidating its operations in six cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad and is looking at entering the eastern market preferably in Kolkata.