Yatra's heady journey
The travel portal is hurtling towards breakeven.
It’s been a heady journey for 14-month old Yatra.com. The travel and hospitality solutions portal, in which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Pramod Haque has invested, hopes to cross the $120-million mark by the end of 2007. Whilst profitability is another matter—the company hopes to break even by end-2008—the focus currently is on scaling up operations at a tearing pace over the past year.
“Last June, we had less than 30 employees. We finished with 500 employees this August. If you look at transactions, we were doing 40 transactions a day back then; now we have crossed 5,000 transactions per day,” says Dhruv Shringi, Co-founder and CEO, Yatra.com.
Currently, 85 per cent of the company’s income comes from airline bookings, and the rest from the hospitality business. Typically, margins from the airline booking business are lower (around 5-10 per cent) than those in hotel bookings (10-12 per cent).
Yatra has also been beefing up its international operations (mostly Indians headed abroad). “About 22 per cent of revenues come from international; we see that number going upwards of 30 per cent by the end of the year,” says Shringi.
In an attempt to boost international revenues, the company is going the brick-and-mortar way by opening up domestic outlets; the first one will come up in Gurgaon. “Credit card limits in India are hovering around the Rs 50,000 mark. With that sort of a credit limit, it is difficult for a consumer to book an international holiday. Hence a lot of people do their research online but to complete the transaction, they need a physical presence,” explains Shringi. Two more outlets in Mumbai and Bangalore are likely to follow. The company is also seriously looking at expanding in Tier II towns (18 towns in all, mostly state capitals), from where 30 per cent of all its online bookings happen.
