Yatra has partnered with 50+ international airlines to offer global ticketing solutions and are targeting revenues of $120 million by year end (via The Hindu).

Now where did I hear that figure earlier – aah yes – Did’nt MakeMyTrip recently announce that that they are expecting full year revenues of $120 million ? For MakeMyTrip, I can understand the $120 million considering that they have been operating in the international ticketing market for the last 3-4 years and have the biggest market share (And I wont be surprised if the international market contributes a sizeable chunk to this revenue). But Yatra hoping to reach $120 million by year end ? Sounds overly exaggerated considering that they launched only in September last year. Yatra co-founder claims current revenues of $5 million a month & I’m still trying to make sense of it. Is Yatra so popular in the Indian domestic travel market ? Can anyone comment on how popular Yatra is in the domestic travel market ? In my opinion, this may very well just be a marketing move to respond to MakeMyTrip’s announcement last week.
As part of the same news release, they announced the launch of Raahi.com – a social networking site that aggregates content related to travel advisory and other support functions. A social networking site !!! – for heavens sake – all they have is blogs, photos and are hoping this will translate to travel journals for users. The site is based on Joomla – a popular PHP based Content Management System – they left the default favicon.ico (the small image that appears in FireFox in front of the url – when you bookmark a site, this icon appears against the bookmark). They use the community builder component of Joomla in the hopes of building a social networking site.

If anyone from Yatra is reading this — If Yatra is making $5 million a month, spend some of that money in building a “real” social networking site. Or if you want to pass of a PHP CMS as a social networking site, at least try to do a better job at it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 12:07 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.