Yatra Starts Social Net “Raahi”; Why Not An Answers Site?
The Hindu reports that Yatra.com is expanding its international airlines portfolio: they’ve signed up Lufthansa, Virgin, Gulf Air, Singapore Airlines and Thai. Dhruv Shringi, co-founder of Yatra says that the company is averaging transactions of over $5 million a month, and has a target of $120 million by the end of the year.
Yatra has also launched a social networking site, still in beta, called Raahi.com. Readers may remember a similar initiative by MakeMyTrip called OkTataByeBye.com, which began with a much publicized travel blogger hunt. One doesn’t know what MakeMyTrip did with it, or plans to do with the community.
Raahi has the usual – blogs, photos with ratings and comments; ‘themes’ seem to be the same as categories, but there are tags too. There’s also a city guide, and a listing of latest and most popular posts. In either sidebar is an option to ‘plan your trip’, using Yatra.com. Nothing new there, really.
From the travel groups that I’ve seen on social networking sites and on yahoogroups, it seems to me that they’re primarily user to plan trips and ask for help or feedback. How many people actually will sit and read 30 articles on what to do in Agra? Perhaps an ‘Answers’ model might be better than a blogging model for these sites. Also, there might be an opportunity in allowing users to form closed-user-groups for planning trips, to increase stickiness.
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..Congratulations Yatra TEAM and Dhruv.. I am sure it will become India's TripAdvisor kind of product….
LD Sharma
+919899669966
I believe that we must also understand that the site is still in BETA phase & the internet space is very dynamic, hence the online companies cannot wait like a production unit to get everything setup before launching. Lets wait and watch what they have in mind… At least its a decent start…
Raahi would make its place in the market……shall redefine the travel plans of the population………so I wish Raahi best of luck in its future endeavours….
What does raahi mean
If anyone has a chance of becoming the Tripadvisor of India, it is HolidayIQ (www.holidayiq.com). Just because they are focussed on that.
Yatra & makemytrip just need to focus on getting more people to book hotels online
racheal, well what they are focussing now?
prasath, I meant that the online travel guys shd not de-focus from the task of getting online hotel transactions. It is an e commerce focus, not content development
From all the earlier posts I gather that airline tkt sales is the saving grace now.
Ok., But i dont think focussing on Hotel transactions online, WIll dilute their main business., Because, both are somewhat related.,
The hospitality industry is still in 70's and most of the hotels are running full in India. There is a huge demand and no supply in terms of business hotels at affordable prices. There is no "need" for hotels to sell their rooms online at this moment!
If its holiday hotel/resort booking, then the market is already flooded with many tour operators and agencies.
It can be an additional resource for income at this moment. The day when we have 60% occupancy rates in Hotels in Mumbai, then it makes sense to launch a site exclusively for that.
@racheal : some stupid VC might fall for your ppt . you are talking a language that i used to talk in 1997 :)