India is the most dynamic and fast growing online travel market in the APAC region. Online travel contributes 70% of all e-commerce activities globally. Private equity players have made huge investments in the online travel agency (OTA) segment in the past two years.

This article provides an overview of the industry supply chain and business model of online travel agencies. An analysis of drivers explain factors contributing to the growth of online travel market including proliferation of internet, rising income, online bus ticket search and booking, Indian railways online portal, growth in low-cost carriers, secure payment mechanisms and rise of medical tourism. The key challenges discussed are low margins, high operating costs, poor internet and credit card penetration, and limited inventories and lack of awareness.

The key trends identified include online railway and bus ticket bookings becoming the preferred segment in online travel, growing emergence of corporate travel packages, growth in offline counters, emerging travel information portals backed by OTAs, rising international travel, booming religious tourism, emerging travel information portals, and OTAs serving as a preferred search tool for checking fares and ticket availability.

A Few Facts about OTA in India:

• Online travel contributes 70% of all e-commerce activities globally.

• Total tickets available for sale (Only Domestic) per day are : 275,680

• Total Ticket Sold by all OTAs per day = 51,690

• Market size for Indian OTA Industry in Domestic Flights: 9,000 crores approximately

• Nearly 40% of the tickets sold are through OTA.

On an average, every aircraft in India does 5.6 flights per day. If airlines could further manage route optimization and do 1 more flight per day, at 6.6 flights per day, OTA Industry Sales will be up by 15%.

Online Bus Ticket Booking in India:

One of the major modes of transport in India is Bus. Now with good roads, online bus ticket booking and Volvo buses road travel is comfortable. As flight rates are high and train tickets are well booked in advance, travelers preferred to look for bus ticket availability online. For a shorter distance routes like – Bangalore to Mumbai, Bangalore to Goa, Mumbai to Goa, Bangalore to Chennai/Hyderabad, Chennai to Hyderabad etc. bus is become one of the most preferred mode of travel.

How it started: The Indian bus transport industry has long been a highly fragmented and unorganized sector. Some 2,000 private bus operators run about 20,000 buses on long distance point-to-point routes. The buses are formally known as "contract carriages" and tickets have to be bought in advance. Short-distance "stage carriages" form the other category of buses in India; to ride these buses, commuters buy tickets on the vehicle itself and can get on and off at multiple points.

While a few contract carriage operators have large fleets of about 100 buses each, most are small players with five to 10 buses. Some firms operate with only one or two buses each. The bus operators are all regional players lacking a countrywide presence. Given the scale of their operations, the majority of them do not offer computerized ticketing or reservations. Instead, the companies rely on a network of travel agents to handle bookings. Agents are given quotas of seats from the bus operators; they inform the bus company by phone each time a seat is sold to a passenger.

But the travel agents to not have any information regarding the status of the seats given to the other agents. The end result: a losing proposition for the bus operators, the agents and the customers -- who often end up seat less. The system has other limitations. In most cases, there are no provisions in place for booking return tickets. Usually, there are no published fares and the customers end up paying what the agents demand for a ticket. There is no standardized system of numbering seats, meaning customers are not assured of seat preference. The bus operators often have cash flow problems because agents usually pay them monthly.

Present Scenario: Booking an inter-city bus ticket in India is fairly simple these days. A few clicks on the Internet or a phone call is all it takes to complete a process similar to the one used to purchase airline tickets. There was an online world before the advent of the World Wide Web in the form of private and commercial online services, via packet switched network using X.25. Travel technology played a significant role in the e-commerce world where we live in.

Prior to the Internet, consumers would generally access to the relevant information visiting upon the actual site. Even if they had access to the resources of professional buyers, they would manually and rationally sift through the reasonable deal of time. But now is internet age. If you want anything, just make a gentle click and get access to hordes of related sites. Pick and fix up the offer you like most. It gives advantage greatly to get things simply, completely, conveniently. The online bus ticket booking has its advantages, as it is a function to pay money online and gain the impression of the price tag. In addition, one has the function of collecting a variety of security and therefore the nature of the seat window or aisle. These options are enabled by most state transportation companies. Book an individual buses in the bus terminal can be a bit tedious. Chances are that you cannot get the price as the result of service errors.

An increasing emphasis on train and road bookings – According to Applied Travel Intelligence, online car rentals and bus reservations will be a $150 million business by 2011.

Via has pioneered the online travel B2B model in India. One of the biggest paradigm shifts in the way travel has ever been sold globally. Via pioneered an inclusive business model, where they could bring to a customer, best in class travel services through retail. We thought, whether there is need to compete at all, when all they needed to do is reach the customer..What they created is a global company delivering locally in each neighborhood, in the most personalized manner, which is the dream of the servicing industry, local knowledge helped us deliver phenomenal products, in his language, his currency with precision which no CRM system could beat.

Via.com is a leader in travel automation and technology. With a vision to provide seamless service to it’s' customer and provide best service at cheapest rate, via.com has evolve a new era of technologies in travel industry. Now cheap air ticket, online bus ticket booking, railway reservation; through IRCTC is easy and accessible from web and mobile app.