We Have the Most Comprehensive Inventory of Hotels and Airlines: Kousik Bhattacharya, Via.com

Bikramjit Ray Jun 14, 2016

BW Hotelier spoke to Kousik Bhattacharya, Head- Digital Marketing & Ecommerce, Via.com,‎ the Bengaluru based travel website.

Via.com was created by Vinay Gupta in 2006 to provide a platform for travel professionals where they could access extensive hotel and airline inventories. The website took care of all the necessary affiliations and passed on the benefits to their clients, who included small businesses.

Once the original business took off, they then spread their platform to different channels. At present, the website have dedicated services for corporate clients, MICE clients and of course online B2C clients. Their B2B business remains their core strength.

“We have the most comprehensive inventory in the world. We are present in six countries: India, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, UAE and Thailand. We have integrated all the airlines present, not many other platform would have as many,” Bhattacharya said.

Speaking about growth, he told us that the trajectory was great. “B2B obviously has a normal pace. We now have over 100,000 partners across the world (75,000 of these are in India),” he added. The target was to add 1,000 new sign ups every day and doubling the B2B customer base to 2,00,000 by the end of 2016 fiscal, Bhattacharya told us. In the B2C space, growth has been phenomenal in the two years that the business has existed in this area, with a 200 per cent increase, he said.

On the conflict with B2B and B2C businesses and how Via.com tackles the issue, Bhattacharya said, “We are very careful that our B2C business does not eat into our B2B business. We maintain that our B2B partners have exclusivity over our B2C platform. In the B2C space, we maintain rate parity for our agents. We ensure that benefits in terms of commission or discounts or special rates are more for our B2B clients”.

At present, they have an inventory of over 5,00,000 hotels on the platform and this is an on going process, he said adding that properties are reviewed periodically and may lose their space if they don’t come up to scratch. “If you look at the AirBnB model, we have similar properties in our inventory. If you look at B &B model, we have those too,” he said by way of explaining that all hospitality properties have a space on Via.com.

On the specific concerns of hotels and hoteliers who are potential clients, Bhattacharya told us, “We see that OTAs are into discounting game where they don’t build value for customers. They give huge cash backs. We want to build value for the user as well as the hotel. For Hoteliers, it is an exciting platform because we have over 1.00,000 outlets across the world. There is a possibility to sell your inventory through them. If you are exclusive to us, you will also get space to actually physically advertise in the outlets. Other than the B2B clients, we also have 8,000 corporate clients who buy from us directly, another potential point of sale”.

Joining is free, though an on field team visits potential properties and do a curation to see if they match the parameters in their category, he added.