ChalBabaChal.com will enable people to get flight details, search for hotel deals and find out the availability of train tickets. Online travel search is 3-4 per cent of the $2 billion online travel market in India.
How will ChalBabaChal.com function? After entering essential details in the domestic flight search, the search engine immediately crawls the websites of major airlines, such as Kingfisher and Jet Airways, and presents the required details.
Similarly, for the hotel search, ChalBabaChal.com crawls the websites of various online travel agencies (OTAs), such as Travelocity.co.in, Expedia.com and TravelGuru.com to retrieve details about hotels.
Percept Knorigin claims that ChalBabaChal.com is capable of searching details of about nine lakh hotels, across 20,000 destinations in 118 countries.
Although the search engine shows important details of flights, hotels and trains, but consumers cannot use the portal for online bookings. For this, they are redirected to the airline or hotel site.
On the revenue model, Viraj Malik, MD and CEO, Percept Knorigin, said, “In the flight search, we will earn revenue as a commission from the airline companies. In the case of hotel search, Percept Knorigin will share revenue with OTAs. Apart from revenue-sharing arrangements, ChalBabaChal.com will also be monetised by hosting ads.”
The flight search will have two revenue models. The traffic routed to the airline companies’ websites will either be monetised on the basis of volume of consumers redirected or the number of consumer acquired by the airline company.
In case of hotel search, wherein the traffic is routed from ChalBabaChal.com to an OTA to the hotel site, the revenue earned by the OTA from the hospitality for hotel room booking, will be shared with the travel search engine.
He says, “We are eyeing to earn additional revenue by creating our own online properties. Although the revenue will not be significant from our own online properties for the next two years, but the sites created by us will help the company to feed the ad inventory we will get for AdChakra.”