Indian travel search and trip-planning site Ixigo is ready to expand its recently launched taxi meta overseas and is also working on a ground-breaking tie-up with Micromax, the handset manufacturer which took a stake in Ixigo earlier this year.
Aloke Bajpai, Ixigo's co-founder and CEO, told Tnooz about the two initiatives, starting with plans for Ixigo Cabs, an app it launched this summer which aggregates taxi inventory from other apps and connects directly to the supplier's booking page.
He said that this was one of the first taxi metas in the market. "The app has become popular very quickly and we're definitely considering going international. Some business travellers who go overseas a lot might have 20 different apps on their phone so there is a market there. Our investors are interested in this too."
A more concrete development in the taxi app space is the imminent launch of an intercity taxis product, based on the technology and inventory Ixigo acquired when it bought Rutogo this August.
Bajpai explained: "We saw that we have commuters using our trains and buses apps to book, and we think intercity cabs are a viable option. Roads are much better these days and for some trips of around say 300km, where the railway is slow, there's not much difference in time or cost if the taxi can be shared.
"We think intercity cabs is $6 billion a year market in India, and online is only a very small part of this. There are lots of startups in the space, as they can put feet on the ground and build the city pairs. This is why we bought Rutogo, as it gave us a relationship with 900 taxi providers in more than 80 cities."
He is hopeful that it will launch "early November" and was also quick to point out that it was a different proposition from Blablacar, with whom it has a partnership. "It's intercity taxis, not intercity rideshares," he said. "We do good business with Blablacar and the two serves different demands."
The other news to come out of the interview is that Ixigo apps will be embedded into Micromax handsets. "We think this is a world-first," he said, "the first native travel booking experience. The apps are integrated using our APIs and it's almost ready to go live."
The investment from Micromax was also the start of a partnership which will contribute to a big ramp-up in Ixigo mobile users, with Bajpai looking at 90 million in the current financial year compared with 50 million a year ago.
There are two big trends in India at the moment - the "mobile web versus app debate" and the emergence of the branded online budget accommodation aggregator sector. Bajpai had plenty to say on both.
On mobile web versus apps, he noted: "Long-term, the transaction funnel will move to an app-only environment, but at Ixigo we cater to the entire lifecycle and believe that research, planning, comparison shopping and inspiration will still be big on the mobile web."
But he also brought Google into the mix. "We still gets lots of traffic from Google so we will not be taking down the web any time soon," he said. "And now that Google allows deep links in apps it is important to keep working with them," referring to a relatively new move by Google which indexes apps in search results, including the install now button, so that they can be downloaded directly.
Ixigo has dedicated apps for cabs, trains and hotels, travel, buses and a big-data-driven PNR status app for rail waitlist products.
"It was a bold move in 2013 to start building specific apps, but we've noticed that most OTAs are now doing the same thing so we've been proven right. One benefit to this approach was that, internally, our teams started thinking specifically rather than generically and developed apps with that specific use case in mind. So people using the travel app to book flights are more evolved and experienced, train and bus users like one-tap bookings, we needed big data in the background of the PNR app."
The apps however are not "standalone" and there are many cross-sell permutations. "We know that someone on a train is half an hour away from arrival, so we send them an alert asking if they want a cab when they arrive at the station, linking through to Ixigo Cabs.
"If it looks like someone will not get on the waitlist for their train, we can send them flight options."
This cross-selling across its apps portfolio is also key to its approach to the budget hotel sector - namely to build up its range of budget inventory, including distribution deals with the branded leaders Oyo, Zo and the many and varied new market entrants.
Ixigo is thinking along the lines that its bus and rail customers will opt for budget accommodation over the more expensive options. And Bajpai added "We've got an estimated 300 million people in India coming online via their smartphones and new users in particular will not be booking four and five star hotels, they will want to book budget hotels simply which is why we are building up the supply."
Related reading from Tnooz:
Yatra uses Travelguru presence to launch budget hotels and homestays brand (October 2015)
Cleartrip sees mobile web and app remaining active (Oct2015)
Ibibo sees B2B as a vehicle for better B2C (Sept 2015)
India sets the standard for branded budget hotels (Aug2015)