Newstrack

HolidayIQ to increase offline suppliers

Chetan Kapoor - Mumbai

Hari Nair

Travel content website HolidayIQ is aiming to increase its offline suppliers for booking accommodation mentioned on its portal. At present, when one reads reviews about accommodations and wants to book the same, they are linked to several OTAs. However, if they have personalised requests, it is carried out by the portal's offline suppliers.

Hari Nair, its founder and CEO, said, "We want to increase our offline suppliers from the current five across the country to 50 over a period of time since travel agents are not fully geared to do online deals yet. At the same time, we need to ensure that these agents have good relations with the hoteliers to get the personalised requests fulfilled."

Elaborating on the portal, "Our idea is to build a brand for media and an entertainment outlet for travel through content that is user-generated and in-house," informed Nair. The portal is an information powerhouse with around four lakh pages of content which includes 7,500 options of accommodation with over 95 per cent of all organised accommodation viz., hotels, resorts, home stay, bed and breakfast, etc., 300 Indian destinations and about 500-550 new destinations are being added from 160 countries. The website is constantly adding new information and content which Nair regards as a pool of research for the four lakh visitors to the website. "We can be easily considered as the largest travel website in India, if one looks beyond the OTAs," concluded Nair.