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Tripraja entices offline agencies to eat online pie

Chetan Kapoor - Mumbai

Amit Bhartiya

Tripraja, a travel portal that was launched by Komli Media recently, already claims to have registered 180 agents since its launch in April. It is now looking at signing up more by affiliating with trade associations, participating in trade shows, ground level marketing and word of mouth.

According to Amit Bhartiya, business head at Komli Media, the portal aims to attract offline agencies to target the online community by means of lead generation. "The idea of lead generation is to pick them up and offer choices. The customer has a demand and expresses his needs and by matching them with a reasonable profile of agencies, we can serve the intermediary market," he says.

The specialists can participate by paying a one-time training and registration fee of Rs 2,000. Further, registered users can create campaigns and decide customer profile based on preset criteria - segment of travel, budgets, etc - for leads referred. "They can fine-tune their criteria depending on what is most likely to convert," he added. Once the consumer submits his needs, it is verified by a call centre after which the system forwards it to a maximum of five specialists based on the criteria chosen. The system then decides the bidding price between the agents to get access and service the customer and also have exclusive access to the lead for a maximum of 48 hours.

"There will be real time forwarding of the lead and our advice to the specialist would be in making the call within one hour of the placed request. It is a pay-for-performance model for the specialist and is done only after the deal is closed," he points. However, when questioned about the efficiency of the specialist, Bhartiya noted that a ratings system will soon be introduced for the customer to evaluate the specialist's service and performance.