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STATS & STRATS: Q&A A Tale Of A Smooth Take Off eTravelIndia is one of those rare dotcoms-it calls itself a travel management and travel technology company-that identified its niche right from the start. BT's Roshni Jayakar talks to the company's CEO Sanjeev Agarwal on the electronic future of the corporate travel business
Q. There are travel portals and travel portals? How different is eTravelIndia? A. Well, we have a different approach. We set out with the ambition of creating India's largest corporate travel company in a period of five years. Technology and the internet was clearly one means to that. This approach meant that we focus on creating real business of revenues and profits. You describe yourself a travel management and travel technology company... Yes. Our significant value to clients is driven by technology. In fact, we have earmarked $2 million towards developing the technology platform for the Application service provider model of its business. What are the innovative travel services that you offer? Apart from plain vanilla corporate travel management services, we offer three technology-advantages to our customers. The first is an online corporate booking solution which seeks to give the customers maximum options in travel planning. Then there's an SMS-based flight tracking and alert system that keeps tabs on flight arrivals and departures for more than forty airlines worldwide. The third one is a Travel Cost and Control Management System, which enables clients access huge amounts of information such as invoice details, vendor analysis, travel analysis by department, by cost codes, and so on. This not only streamlines the accounting process, but also helps them negotiate better with suppliers and get higher cost benefits. In the very first year you claimed to have notched up sales worth Rs 80 crore... Well, we were lucky to get well-known clients. This led to further growth and our sales grew exponentially. This fiscal, we have pegged the net profit target at Rs 2 crore. You've tied up with TQ3, the UK-based global travel services company... TQ3 is a large global travel management company with over $9 billion in sales, and a presence in 55 countries. This network enables our customers access a global network, seek airport assistance in European airports, and access globally negotiated supplier deals. As part of tq3 family we also get to manage the business of their global clients in India. But the global atmosphere right now has jeopardised the entire travel industry... The impact of terrorist attacks has been severe. We have been fortunate that we are focused on the business travel segment and not leisure travel; hence, the impact has been less. We have also been able to manage the decline in revenue per customer caused due to the attacks by increasing our customer base. The
Book Of Hope
E-books might not exactly be the hottest thing happening in the publishing industry, but when famed Indo-Anglian writer Amitava Ghosh's Glass Palace netted the Frankfurt eBook of the Year award in the fiction category, it made a few heads turn and take note of the new medium. For those inclined towards definitions, electronic books, or e-books, that can be books in computer file format and read on all types of computers, including handheld devices designed specifically for reading e-books. ''At the simplest level, an e-book is a book just like any other book,'' says Phyllis Rossiter Modeland, former editor of the e-book reader electronic magazine The RunningRiver Reader. ''It has 'cover' art, a title page, an ISBN, a copyright notice, an editor and publisher, and an author.'' Internationally accepted formats for e-books are .pdf, .lit, and .rb, built on free software Adobe Glassbook, Microsoft Reader, and Gemstar reb respectively. In India, the concept of e-books is at least three to five years away from attaining proportions of any consequence, but a start has been made. ''At the moment we don't have any plans of introducing e-books in the Indian market, but our parent company in the UK has just added them to its portfolio,'' says Thomas Abraham, National Manager (Sales & Marketing), Penguin India. Delhi based online bookstore firstandsecond.com pioneered the e-book culture in this part of the world with some concept selling through its interactive novel anchored by Bollywood actress Tara Deshpande. ''We wanted to highlight that fact that the new medium reduces the cost of owning a book by one-fifth,'' says G.B.S. Bindra, President, Firstandsecond.com. He believes that the demand for e-books is set to go up as the penetration of hand-held devices in the country increases. -T.R. Vivek Birth Of A Dotcom Hats off to the dotcommer who quipped that anyone who launches a dotcom in these times should be either serious or stupid. Now, there's a portal on the horizon, promoted by the Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical major, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories that surely of the 'serious-effort' variety. Livizi.com-pronounced "live easy"-will be a ''unique, one-stop shop to fulfill the health-related needs of every individual.'' Satish Reddy, Managing Director & coo, Dr Reddy's Labs says livizi doesn't just want to be a dotcom that makes money: ''We don't need the portal to have a separate revenue stream. Livizi is meant to be a part of DRL's overall business strategy.'' Reddy adds that company has invested Rs 40 lakh in the portal, which was developed in association with Satyam Infoway. Interestingly, for a site being promoted by a pharma major-it will be up only by October end-livizi will have an emphasis on alternative medicine. Says Reddy, ''Health is a holistic issue and therefore the approach to health also should be holistic." Apart from plain vanilla content on health, the site plans to host interactive health check-up interfaces. Interactivity extends to a Kaun Banega Arogyapathi competition, which DRL hopes will bring in traffic. ''The livizi content will be formidable in terms of number of features as well as the depth of information.'' says a DRL official. Well, we've heard that one before. But health is wealth. And we wish livizi both. -E. Kumar Sharma 1 2 |
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