"The challenge at the moment is to create critical mass on a much larger scale"
Published: 25 Nov 2008
Online Travel Strategies India Special
Indian travel community raahi.com has taken a cautious approach towards its product development. The site, which has focused on building three products so far, has been mindful of slowly building on the product piece by piece.
Acknowledging the same, Ayesha Kapur, business head, raahi, says, "raahi continues to be a work in progress given the vast areas that we are trying to cover. We have been mindful of slowly building on the product piece by piece and being extremely mindful of holding off on marketing budgets till we get the product to a point where it can be monetised vis a vis content-led travel fulfillment."
"In the long run, we see raahi becoming an online resource that people in a particular space (read destination) can decide on things to do, places to stay, dining options, etc," said Kapur, who is scheduled to speak during Online Travel Strategies India conference, to be held as a part of EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution India Summit 2008 in Mumbai on November 26-27.
The team has focused on building three products so far. These include a comprehensive destination guide for which the company has partnered with leading content providers in Outlook for India and Lonely Planet for International travel.
"We have successfully generated about 15,000 hotel reviews covering over 3000 properties – sufficient to effect a buying decision. We will continue to invest in this endeavour to cover more experiences. Last but not least we have over 40 travel experts that help the raahi community on travel decisions and advice. We cover pretty much anything related to travel through our Q & A section and have realised the importance of driving quality and relevant content over quantity. Our experts are complimented by over 30,000 registered members who form a part of this community as well," shared Kapur.
Going forward, the site is now going to focus on building up a restaurants section on the site.
Consumers currently have to swim through an ocean of unorganised information from friends, guidebooks, review sites, blogs, photo and video sites, newspapers and communities. Even if a consumer is on a particular portal, it is quite critical to ensure users know the source of the information.
Kapur agrees with this and says currently there is a lot of content available albeit scattered.
"We are trying to build each of these individual blocks to create a comprehensive vertical through raahi," she said.
Commenting on various content sources and whether it can create a lot of uncertainty and confusion among travel suppliers and travel consumers alike, Kapur said the situation can be complex if all of it is found at one place.
"But the real power of user generated content is that you get at the "source" itself. Users are smart enough to wade through the content and pick up on consistencies to form an overall opinion."
"Case in point if you have say 10 reviews for a particular hotel with an overall rating of 4/5, a user 'knows' what he/she is getting into notwithstanding the one review which was poor in regard to a persons stay. Likewise if a hotel has an overall rating of 1/5, users know clearly to stay away. The challenge at the moment is to create critical mass on a much larger scale so that information is more relevant on the basis of a socio profile - it would be really exciting to segregate experiences based on age, budget, type of traveller etc. down the road and make that content available to say someone who is for example 26 years old, looking for a moderate budget and is a wildlife enthusiast," said Kapur.
Ritesh Gupta,
EyeforTravel.com
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