India’s leading travel platform, ixigo is venturing into supply side technology platforms for airlines through the launch of its subsidiary Travenues. Travenues, which will be headquartered in Bengaluru, will be spearheaded by Chandramouli Gopalakrishnan, who is a seasoned engineering and product management leader and has held product leadership roles at Shotang, Stayzilla and Goibibo in his previous stints.
Speaking about the development, Rajnish Kumar, CTO & Co-founder, ixigo said, “Consumer-facing technology and product innovation is hard for airlines to manage since their core business focus is on running planes efficiently. In a fast growing mobile-first world, travellers expect airlines to adopt new technology and consumer experiences across pre and post-booking and to develop more agility in upgrading their ability to market, sell and personalize their inventory and inventory from their ancillary partners.”
Aloke Bajpai, CEO & Co-Founder, added – “With over a decade of experience in building India’s leading mobile travel marketplace, we will be bringing our learnings on mobile-first consumer experiences, growth marketing, personalization, AI and voice assistants to airlines across the world. Travenues will function as an independently run business under Chandramouli’s leadership with the mission of bringing consumer-facing deep tech innovations to airlines.”
Travenues is led by a team that has a combined experience of 20+ years in the global travel industry across GDS (Global Distribution Systems), OTA (Online Travel Agency), and meta-search.
Speaking on the new initiative, Chandramouli Gopalakrishnan, Chief Digital Officer, Travenues said, “Our mission is to help airlines power their own consumer selling experiences through a platform that uses the latest deep tech advancements in UX, engagement, segmentation, targeting, cross-selling, payments, customer service and more! We partner with airlines that wish to focus on running their planes and want to leave the tech to us. Unlike technology service providers who currently manage these experiences for them, we are actual practitioners who have built and scaled such platforms to millions of daily active users.”
ixigo, which is now the largest mobile travel platform in India with over 100 million downloads and 26 million monthly active users, aggregates and compares real-time travel information, prices & availability for flights, trains, buses, cabs, hotels, packages & destinations. ixigo has been at the forefront of tech innovation in travel for a decade with innovative products such as India’s first instant-bookable marketplace across OTAs, PNR prediction for trains, flight fare predictions and TARA, its voice and chat-based travel assistant that was a Phocuswright Award Winner in 2017.
About Travenues
Travenues is a technology platform business for airlines and a subsidiary of ixigo, India’s leading mobile travel marketplace. Travenues was founded by a team with decades of experiences across GDS, OTA and meta-search business and its investors include Sequoia Capital India, Fosun RZ Capital, SAIF Partners, MakeMyTrip & Micromax.