Airlines Technology is transforming the marketplace of air travel by its NDC based IT solutions. 75% of travel bookings today are done on travel agent portals. On portals, traveler can see only fare and schedule (what time flight will leave and what time it will reach). This leaves huge gap where airlines can’t sell their other onboard services like meal, preferred sitting, lounge access, on board special services like wine, entertainment of choice and some basic necessities like wheel chair, porter etc. If you want those, you have to contact your airlines directly (which maximum do not) before any traveler boards. With NDC, end consumer will be able to shop and chose what they wants directly on travel portal. This will lead to great travel experience/planning and revenue for airlines. The startup will aggregate this rich content between airlines, third party vendors and travel portals. It is also helping them to create their existing legacy systems to be NDC compliant.
Airlines Technology was founded on 30 June 2015 by Smriti Kumar , Varun Bansal and Paras Kumar. All 3 had common goal and zeal to create something disruptive and with potential of exponential growth.
AT is headquartered in Gurgaon, having presence across India, Australia , USA and Switzerland, and intending to use the proceeds to set up offices in the UK, the US and the UAE in next three-five years. The company is also looking at more than 150 million transactions and 3 per cent of global aggregation volume in next 5 years. With 3 per cent volume, AT expects revenues of $200 million.
In an interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, Varun Bansal, Co-Founder & Director, AT, shares details about his venture.
Idea GenerationWe wanted to start something of our own. Paras came across this idea of NDC while doing some research and rest to immediately jumped on that. We did our thorough research of 2-3 months, spoke to few IATA (International Air Transport Association) officials , created prototypes and POC , shared with industry professionals and concluded “ We are doing it “.
DifferentiationThere is no competition in India for this. We are first to do it. Globally we got good competition from existing veteran GDS systems. Our concept and pace is our key differentiator. Due to legal hassles, running business constraints and reluctance to adopt something new, existing systems will take ages to adopt what we are doing.
Funding status We are part of Travel startups incubator since May 2016. They are investing huge amount of time and energy in mentoring our strategy and business goals. Best part of this travel incubator is that they got huge panel of travel experts as mentors and advisors and we can speak to them anytime for our queries. All have huge experience in travel via IATA, mentoring , running their own travel companies and consultancies etc.
Monetization model The startup monetises by following steps:
- We will charge per transaction aggregated between airlines and travel agent.
- Selling data analytics services
- IT solution to Airlines and OTAs - help become NDC compliant
- Products around NDC Aggregation ( Eg NDC Service Connector )
- Scope to earn through selling ancillary services, cross selling and up selling besides ticketing.
Traction detailsOur aggregation services on rich content is biggest traction. We are offering rich content aggregation between ota, airlines and third party vendors. Apart from aggregation, we are offering cms , it solutions on Ndc and data analytics to clients
Marketing plans We are B2B. So we do not promote ourselves to everybody. We do attend lot of airlines distribution conferences to network and meet potential new clients and partners. We also take great help from our mentors and investor for industry contacts.
Market size & opportunity Right now there are more than 400 global airlines booking more than 1.75 billion air tickets annually. More than 70000 travel agents are involved in the industry. All need NDC to stay in business. We plan to capture around 3% of industry volume by 2020.