Here are three eye-catching stories out of India.
India's largest online travel agency by ticket volume, MakeMyTrip, has purchased travel site HotelTravel for $25 million.
Meanwhile, RezNext, a hotel distribution platform targeting Asian businesses first, has debuted, and travel search engine iXiGO says is clocking 45,000 transactions a month.
MakeMyTrip makes another acquisition
Tnooz reported a couple of months ago that MakeMyTrip has been looking to acquire companies that are bundling hotels and holidays, to help it shift away from being dependent on 75% of its revenue from low-margin air ticket sales.
Well, it's bought HotelTravel, a Thai online travel agency focused on selling 80,000 hotels in South East Asia, for $25 million, giving the company a foothold in expanding markets in Malaysia and Singapore.
$15 million was paid in a mix of cash and MakeMyTrip shares on November 6. The remaining $10 million will be paid in the form of MakeMyTrip shares in three annual tranches.
This means a nice payday for Blair Speers, founder of HotelTravel.com. He's a Canadian national who founded HotelTravel.com in 1999 and lives in Phuket.
RezNet launches
IDS Next, a technology company for the hospitality industry, has launched RezNext, a B2B distribution company that, the company says, "bridges the gap between a hotel's reservation system and online booking channels."
The company says the product works in "real-time" with a hotel's web booking engine, mobile platform and GDS channels and Facebook web booking engines through a single extranet "in a cost effective manner," though such services usually rely on cached data instead of true "real-time" connections.
The managing director of RezNet Suresh John, said in a statement,
"India has a dearth of hotel rooms, and yet, occupancy hovers at just 60% - 65%. RezNext is set to change this... Every hospitality property now has a technology solution to harness the power of the internet, once thought possible only for large hotel chains."
RezNext has been incubated by IDS Next, a 25-year old provider of enterprise-resource planning (ERP) tools to hotels. IDS Next has 3,000 customers in 40 countries, many of whom are in Asia.
Metasearch revs up
IXiGo, an Indian metasearch site, says it is receiving 1 million unique visitors a month, which it says converts into around 1,500 transaction a day.
Founded in 2007 in Gurgaon, the company recently launched a multi-modal trip-planning tool that enables a user to trace the distance, time of travel, and cost of moving between Point A and Point B through a mix of flights, trains, buses, as well as cabs/private cars.
A year ago, iXiGO raised its last round of funding of $18.5 million from SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip. It provides a simplified version of its multi-modal search tool for MakeMyTrip's site, called RoutePlanner. Rumors are rife that the company is a takeover target of MakeMyTrip.