Also compared to other businesses, travel business in India seems to be the leader as far as adapting technology is concerned. According to ‘Digital Summit 2006’ statistics Indian railways (http://irctc.co.in/) is selling tickets worth Rs.30 crore every month which is having about 200,000 online transactions. The low-cost airline Air Deccan (http://www.airdeccan.net/) is making user of their online reservation system for all sorts of customers (Retail, travel agents, corporate bulk booking) and their run rate is Rs.1000 crore per year. Couple of days back Prathap Kalra CEO of ‘Makemytrip’ (http://www.makemytrip.com/) appeared in NDTV’s ‘Boss-day-out’ program and he was explaining about the travel and internet usage in India. Even though I don’t remember the exact numbers the growth potential offered by the online travel is simply amazing.
The benefit and ease of online travel has not yet reached average non-urban Indians. It is mainly because of the less PC and Internet penetration. The idea of Rs.10, 000 PC is looking good but its success is not yet proven. Here is where the ‘Affordable access devices (AAD)’ come into picture and I cannot think of a better AAD than mobile phones in Indian context. By bringing Internet into the mobile phone and developing applications especially for online ticketing is an area which is yet to be tapped.
