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Aloke Bajpai is a founder of iXigo, an Indian travel search engine that currently serves domestic airline bookings.

The online travel business is a fast growing market segment due to increased travel in India as well as growing number of travel service providers like airlines and hotels. This market segment is also competitive with multiple players including travel agencies like Yatra, MakeMytrip and travel search portals like iXigo, Zoomtra.

In this interview Aloke talks about the market, iXigo’s value proposition and competitive positioning, revenue model as well as general tips on how to bootstrap and build a successful company.

(Click here to see a list of Consumer Internet companies in India like iXigo)

Transcript of interview with Ixigo.

What is iXigo –
iXiGO is a travel search engine for Indian consumers. It currently focuses on airline ticket search.

Any plans to extend your search beyond airlines?
We are currently evaluating other search opportunities such as hotel reservations, tours/activities, railway booking etc but have no immediate release announcements to make.

When was iXigo founded and who are the founders?
iXigo was founded in early 2006. The founders are Aloke Bajpai, Jens Schutter, Rajnish Kumar and Dharmendra Yashovardhan. The idea was conceived while Aloke was at INSEAD business school. Aloke, Rajnish and Jens are from Amadeus, the world’s largest travel technology company, while Dharmendra is Aloke’s classmate from INSEAD. The entire iXigo team possesses knowledge in what we believe are the three pillars of building a successful company in this space – Business, Technology and domain (Travel) expertise.

Where is iXigo located?
Gurgaon, India

How is the company funded?
Bootstrapped. Before building iXigo, the founders also provided product strategy consulting to another innovative European travel company and the proceeds from this engagement helped fund iXigo’s ongoing operations.

How do you compare yourselves against other travel portals like Cleartrip, Yatra, MakeMyTrip?
These companies are travel agencies that sell tickets on their own platform. We are a travel search portal that searches for the best deals on the web, and then takes you to the airline you select to buy a ticket for. In fact we complement these companies, since we can even search the travel agencies along with the airlines directly for the best price. This will be even more useful for products like hotels and packages, where product differentiation and price differentiation occurs.

Prices for the same air-ticket at the same time on different travel agencies like Yatra, MakeMyTrip will never be the same as they charge additional booking fees based on their relationship with the carrier. We don’t charge additional fees. We simply aggregate ALL available flights and redirect you to the airlines web site for the ticket you wish to purchase. Our unbiased and comprehensive service will almost always provide the lowest price.

Many Indian consumers feel more comfortable entering their credit card on the well known airline’s Web site than a travel agency’s site. We plan to attract those customers to our platform since it eases the search on multiple airline websites.

We also believe that our user experience and superior search algorithms are our points of differentiation. Finally we fall in the search quadrant and not transaction quadrant, and so our product roadmap is likely to be significantly different than those of travel agencies. Stay tuned!

OK, so how do you make money?
We have relationships with the airlines by which they pay us for a transaction. Over time we’d like to move to a pure referral model, where we are paid for each referral to the airline’s Web Site. In addition, we will introduce targeted advertising on our platform.

How do you plan to get users to iXigo?
At this point we are relying on word of mouth and making sure we get repeat usage thanks to a great first-time experience. Today 30% of our visitors come to our site again within a month. Also, we already launched two features that came as feedback from users of our product. We plan to continue doing that in the short term, get feedback from our customers and perhaps in the future, launch more mainstream marketing efforts.

Closing thoughts?
Over 55% of people that buy airline tickets online in India, still buy direct from the airlines. Both the travel agency sites and travel search sites like ours provide means for customer to find their right flight, however, we provide a more direct search and comparison for those 55% who still prefer to book directly. This fact, along with the continuing overall surge of air travel in India, makes it a large market potential and a very exciting space to be in!