More on Travel dot coms

The online ticket/travel/hotel booking market has no dearth of new players. The newest one is www.xplorz.com. Waiting in the wings are www.arzoo.com (due shortly), and www.cleartrip.com (though the announcement came as early as in Aug’ 05, it’s yet to go live).

Industry buzz is that www.travelocity.com is also a few months away from launching in India. And the king of all, www.expedia.com is yet to make any announcement. While most of these are full service travel operators, with an operational team, there are a few dot coms that offer only the search services, while the booking has to be done with the actual airlines or on those portals appear in the search results. Thus, we have www.mobissimo.in, which started their India operations, recently. A search for a ticket in Mobissimo will perhaps land you in www.makemytrip.com. Mobissimo claims to have one of the most advanced search engines. www.kayak.com is another player in this segment, though they have not yet launched the Indian operations. One can still search for a Mumbai – Hyderabad ticket in Kayak, book it on Indian, except that the payments will be in dollars.

Xplorz.com claims that they are the only one in India that offers P3, ie, Pick, Pay and Print. (A not-so-clever marketing gimmick, like the XD3 technology your washing powder uses to extract dirt or the Mx2 technology used in your toothpaste that fights germs!)

Arzoo can claim some lineage. Promoted by Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame and supported by some Silicon Valley techies, Arzoo is set to storm the market by offering the largest variety of packages – international and domestic.

Leisure and Lifestyle Information Services (promoters of www.Indiaresorsurvey.com ) is running www.iyatra.com (beta), for online booking of holidays in hotels and resorts in the country. It is quite possible that this portal will evolve into offering services on flight bookings as well.