Face-to-Face with Vikas Gulati, Vice President Asia Pacific; Sprice.com
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1) With travel agents still dominating the Asian market, what trends are you noticing towards online booking engines such as Sprice.com?
There are a few key trends in the Asian travel search industry that Sprice.com has observed. The online travel market is becoming increasingly fragmented with ever more travel suppliers and OTAs. Also, consumers are searching more travel websites before purchase. This clearly indicates that online travel search engines, which allow users to find the best travel offers and information on a single website, is poised for huge growth in Asia.
However, there is generally a lower level of awareness of travel meta search engines and their function among consumers and travel suppliers here. Sprice.com’s focus in Asia Pacific is to further drive consumer as well as industry awareness. We are targeting one million consumers per month in Asia Pacific by mid-2009. As the leading travel search engine in Europe, we expect to be equally successful in Asia Pacific as well.
2) How is Sprice.com able to achieve best available content and rates for its users?
Firstly, Sprice.com is the only truly global travel search engine that works with international as well as local travel agents. This means that users have access to a wider and more localised range of content.
Secondly, Sprice.com also operates via a unique real-time deep-search mechanism. Often Internet users want to search for hotels, car, cruises and even spa packages. Sprice.com has an industry-first holiday package application that allows consumers the access to all that information on a single website. Currently, we are the only website globally to have this product successfully implemented in India.
By combining rich and localised content with real-time deep-search technology, Sprice.com is gaining more consumer popularity. In turn, more travel suppliers around the world recognise us as an effective marketing tool.
3) What plans does Sprice.com have in targeting the lucrative mainland Chinese market, and what challenges do you face?
Sprice.com is focused on driving growth in our key markets, namely Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand, with Singapore. We are launching in India shortly and that is central to our plans in Asia.
We are targeting to launch our China site between 2009 and 2010. While there is currently a low demand among Chinese users for travel search engines, Chinese is a lucrative travel market that has vast opportunities. The main challenge is to have the best content. That is why Sprice.com’s key objective is to develop rich content that is relevant to the local consumers.
Sprice.com is the only international travel search engine capable to handle this content and this is due to our unique real-time deep-search technology.
4) Have you experienced difficulties with suppliers who want to drive traffic from their own websites (especially low-cost airlines)?
We are a travel search engine and a marketing tool for travel suppliers, rather than a competitor. Our strength stems from the fact that we are absolutely objective in our search results and consumers can expect a neutral response to the search results.
5) Sprice.com has come a long way in short space of time. What developments can we expect to see from Sprice.com in the future?
To continue our rapid expansion in Asia Pacific, we are building partnerships with leading portals to reach a wider audience. At the same time, we will continue to explore strategic partnerships with travel suppliers to further develop rich and highly-localised content. We are expecting to make more announcements relating to upcoming partnerships and consumer marketing programmes, and will share details with you when they are available.
We are also looking to launch one of the world’s largest consumer-referral websites on hotels in Asia Pacific, as well as a mobile version of Sprice.com.
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