Who is Ghooomo.com.au?
Ghooomo.com.au is a new player in the OTA space, and they are making friends fast, today announcing it has partnered with Booking.com to offer hotel booking options to their customers.
The affiliate partnership will give the customers of the website better options to book a complete holiday from flights to hotels.
Ghooomo, Managing Director, Monish Chand said during the company’s infancy, the core offering and focus is on flights and being able to offer accommodation as an option pre and post flight purchase.
“It is a way for us to be able to keep things tracking along without having to allocate too many resources to manage different product suites.”
The partnership will allow the website to organically grow traffic while building on its brand awareness.
The next six to eight, Ghooomo plans to evolve and grow quite rapidly by leveraging off its airline sales and partnership with Booking.com, and ideally have a larger portfolio of products to offer from travel insurance to car rentals to offer consumers a complete travel and holiday market place.
“At this stage, we are happy where things are heading, we are seeing steady growth month on month and want to build on the momentum with introducing accommodation as a part of our product mix as a nice add on. But for now our main focus is selling flights, building our brand nationally, customer acquisition and working towards building an app for our mobile astute traveller.”
“I have some great ideas for our app and this will definitely become a USP for us if what I have on paper can be built and executed. I think it will be a real game changer,” Chand said.
Travel Weekly spoke to Monish Chand to find out what Ghooomo offers that other OTA’s don’t, setting them apart from the rest.
“At the moment, we are much like most other OTA’s but have a few things in the pipeline that we hope to launch early to mid-next year which will make our online offering more interactive and engaging with the end consumer and really try and put them on the driver’s seat as to what visitors to the site will see.
We are also in the process of working on an app, which at the moment is at the conceptual stage but once again, if we can pull off the execution I really think it will catapult the brand as a favourite travel tool for all travellers and locals.
If we can get these things up and running the way we see it happening, it will definitely set us apart from all other OTA’s as I know none of them are currently doing what we plan on doing. In short our big differentiator in 6-9 months’ time will be our content delivery strategy online and our app (which I think will be a massive game changer). But we need to do more feasibility testing to see whether what we have conceptually can be rolled out as a mobile app.”
When asked if there was concern about the market place already having enough OTAs, Monish Chand said “we are not too worried about the other OTA’s, I think there is room for everyone.
We have found some challenges making a dent in the market but building our brand awareness is something we are working very hard on. If things work out the way we have planned for this summer we will have a lot more exposure and will build our brand presence. Though I do like some of the things Aunt Betty has done with their offering.
The big factor playing in the online space is that we have to be competitive as the market is driven by price with everything being transparent to the end consumer, and the end consumer shopping online may not always be price sensitive but will always choose the cheapest fare for the same product. We do have a few things in the works at the moment to build customer loyalty and retention so they continue to shop with us and this is part of our digital strategy that we hope to launch early to mid-next year. It is something that we have already worked on but I’m not 100% satisfied with it yet, so we will continue working on it till it is right for the market.
But we are not worried, if anything excited to see how we evolve and adapt to the changing travel landscape and what we can offer to be a part of the overall evolution of the industry.”
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