Technically Speaking - Rajnish Kumar of Ixigo

Rajnish Kumar, Ixigo

Ixigo CTO Rajnish Kumar co-founded the travel marketplace in 2007. The platform provides price comparison and booking for flights, hotels, trains, buses and holiday packages. Ixigo now has 90 million app downloads and 21 million monthly active users and is funded by Sequoia Capital India, Fosun RZ Capital, MakeMyTrip Limited and others. 

For our November theme, PhocusWire talks to technology heads on the challenges of their roles and the rapid pace of change in travel technology and distribution.

What technological challenges have you had to address as Ixigo has grown from one million bookings in 2008 to 110 million bookings this year?

We have gone through some very interesting technology and consumer behavior shifts in the last 10 years, and at Ixigo we have been at the forefront of iterating to solve for them.

The first big shift was mobile. In 2013, it was evident to us that our future would be mobile, so we pivoted our entire thinking as a company to mobile-first. We asked all our senior developers to learn Android or iOS development and launched multiple apps in quick succession, two of which have now become the market-leading apps for train travelers and flight bookers.

Our dual-app strategy has allowed us to be relevant to the most evolved Tier 1 travelers and the aspiring middle class and Tier 2, 3 and 4 travelers at the same time.

The other big shift in thinking has been our bet on artificial intelligence/machine learning and voice. We realized many years ago that as a meta platform, our biggest advantage versus online travel agencies was our product and tech intensity.

We took bold bets on building a research team that worked on AI and data-driven predictive use cases such as train seat availability prediction, flight fare prediction and automated seat selection. Today these advanced algorithms and the millions of data points we feed into them every day ensure that our users get better information for making buying decisions than any of our competitors.

Lastly, and most importantly, we have realized the long-term potential of the next billion users by taking a deeper bet than incumbents on categories such as trains, where Ixigo is the market leader in terms of usage, with millions of Indians from smaller towns relying on the Ixigo train app for all sorts of information related to their journeys.

We invested in local language capabilities and had to rethink the entire app strategy from the lens of app size, whether it works offline and the simplicity of the design and user experience so that even a 65-year-old user from a village can use our app. This helps us build trust without spending millions on marketing, and then over time many of these users start booking other products such as buses, hotels and flights with us too.

In terms of technology stacks too, we have not remained wedded for too long to any particular stack or database type or framework and have been fairly versatile and iterative in trying out new stuff if it solves the problem at hand better than the legacy implementation.

And what about the challenges of combining the price comparison service with the booking service?

Moving from a metasearch to a marketplace with instant-booking capabilities on all our major flight booking partners was quite challenging but necessary. The meta-redirection process is full of friction and leads to large drop off since users have to fill in their passenger details each time.

We innovated on this front and have had to built OTA-like capabilities to manage itinerary failures, cached fare changes, payments, trip management, cancellations, etc. We now even provide one level of automated customer support. With every OTA partner or airline partner, there has been some custom development to enable a seamless booking experience without becoming a merchant of record. This means months of development effort for each partner.

With Ixigo Money, our loyalty program across all our OTA partners, we have become the world’s first meta-book with a loyalty program on top. We have had to go two levels deep with our partners, first to enable meta-book and then to allow our users to use their Ixigo Money credits to get an instant discount on their next booking. This was even harder to implement since it essentially meant that our OTA partners accept Ixigo Money as a virtual currency for part payment of the ticket, and it needed major custom development effort at their end.

How has India’s booming tech startup scene impacted Ixigo and your ability to attract talent?

Well, because of the startup boom, the quality of talent and experience available in India has definitely improved, but of course tech talent has become much more expensive. Hiring is never easy, anywhere in the world.

At Ixigo, attracting the best talent has never been a problem, since we have one of the best cultures in the Indian startup ecosystem, and we believe that the best people don’t work only for the money.

We have created an environment where freedom and flexibility is maintained and it’s OK to fail once in a while. This has allowed our “Ixi-gems” to be more proactive, take more ownership and come up with creative solutions to problems. We have been extremely selective at hiring, interviewing 50 candidates for every one we hire, but that’s also one of the reasons folks work with us. Who doesn’t like working with the smartest people?

What single bit of advice would you give an experienced technologist from another sector considering a move into travel?

It’s going to be hard - but hard is fun!

Travel is one of the few sectors where all data and information flows in real-time from supply to consumer, with time-sensitive delivery of information and transactions. There is very little room for failure or delays since they invariably lead to negative customer experience. I can wait for an hour for my e-commerce delivery, but I am unlikely to wait more than 15 seconds for the ticket to be generated once I have paid.

Everyone talks about personalization, but no one has done anything meaningful on it.

Rajnish Kumar

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Consumer expectations on speed, reliability and accuracy are very, very high, and the margin for error for a product manager or developer on your team will be very low. In addition to that, there will be several third-party outages, slow response times and business logics that will impact your user experience, and you have to handle all that in real-time. Building robust systems that can handle millions of events per second is also very challenging. We handle hundreds of millions of events every single day at Ixigo.

Finally, there are very hard user experience problems to crack. When you think of hotel bookings for example, you need to constantly keep experimenting with new ideas to improve UX, and yet even now no one seems to have cracked the problem of plenty in an elegant manner yet. Travel is definitely a domain that will keep you on your toes, and there are still tons of obvious and unsolved problems staring at you in your face every day.

What emerging technologies do you think will have the biggest impact on your business in the next decade?

We think AI, voice and virtual reality will have a massive impact on the travel industry.

For the next billion internet users in India, we are certain that they will not use keyboards but use voice as their primary user interface. Are travel companies prepared? No!

We demoed TARA, our AI-based voice assistant for travel at last year’s Launch at Phocuswright and were runners-up. Now we are building TARA in local Indian languages and expect to take it live next year across Hindi and English. TARA already handles 75% of our customer interactions on email and chat independently and has deep learning capabilities. Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri will help make voice mainstream.

If you think about the inspiration and research phase, VR can let you sample and be at a place before you actually choose to go there. In the foreseeable future, when VR becomes mainstream, travel can get massively disrupted with it.

Everyone talks about personalization, but no one has done anything meaningful on it. We expect personalization to be a lot better on OTAs and metas within the next three years. We’re on it!

If you could talk to travel tech vendors, what is one thing you’d want to tell them?

Stop sending spam, do more research before reaching out to your prospects and build a better understanding of where technology is headed next.

What are the greatest challenges of your role?

Hiring great engineers and product/design-thinking folks. Balancing the daily hustle and chaos with the really deep long-term bets we are taking. Keeping teams aligned and focused on the most critical priorities at all times. Did I say hiring?

What's your view on big consumer brands (Apple, Amazon, Facebook) and their impact on travel going forward?

The large consumer brands have massive reach and are sitting on a lot of data about user behavior. That gives them a massive advantage for any service they choose to sell.

However, travel-focused brands have built trust over the years and have developed very deep insights into traveler behavior, from research to planning to buying and experiencing, which gives them some advantage at least in the short term. We believe that the bigger consumer brands currently play a great role for OTAs and metas for discovery and customer acquisition, and we would be watching closely on how these roles and relationships evolve over time.

Will there ever really be a seamless traveler experience?

We are surely hoping that there will be, and TARA and other such forms of AI-based assistants should play a huge role in it.

Do CIOs/CTOs in travel companies now have the standing they should with the CEO? Do you see those partnerships working effectively generally in the industry?

In new age online travel/mobile travel companies, the CTO and CEO play an equally important role, and at Ixigo, being a co-founder as well as CTO, we have a very effective and equitable partnership in shaping the joint vision of our company.