Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
Yatra.com launches mobile booking tool
The online travel portal makes booking air tickets even more convenient by offering the service over the mobile phone
In its bid to catch travellers on the go, online travel site Yatra.com has launched mobile booking for flights.
Yatra.com has three products for mobile phone booking, catering to phones that are both WAP-enabled and otherwise. “It’s an operator neutral offering – a service open for all telecom service providers,” said Dhruv Shringi, co-founder, Yatra.com. The service is not available to Reliance Communications and Tata Indicom CDMA subscribers yet, but Shringi says this will be enabled in the next two weeks.
The company plans to introduce hotel bookings via mobile in September, following which it will introduce car hire services and bus bookings, too, on the mobile.
The second product is for mobiles that have a GPRS-enabled handset. Yatra.com has rolled out a mobile WAP portal called wap.yatra.com, which can be used to book tickets. Operator GPRS charges will apply for the use of this service.
The third product is a one-time downloadable application, meant for frequent travellers. The application is compatible with all WAP-enabled phones of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, and will be soon on Motorola phones, too. This application has been developed internally by the company.
“Our plans are not very ambitious right now. Out of the 200 million odd mobile phone subscribers in India, we aim to get only 250-300 customers via our mobile offering,” said Shringi.
Customers will be charged through credit card or m-check, a mobile payment mechanism; the company plans to have a cash-delivery payment system in place in the future.