Competing Through Capabilities

Individual Assignment
Case Study: Online Travel Agents in India: Whiter Industry Dynamics

Submitted by
Rajani Nair -2019PGPMX025

30th May 2021

Q.1) Substantiate who has more power OTA’s or the airlines?

According to me the Online Travel Agencies are more powerful than the airline industry
because of the following reasons: -

 The core purpose of online platforms is to simplify the travel planning process for
users.
 It provides the users with the highest level of convenience and time-saving features.
 The target audience of OTAs refers to young professionals, who lie in the age group of
22 to 31year old who are more tech-savvy and ready to spend time and effort in
adopting new products and services.
 Online travel agents get thousands of website visitors from all over the world & they
have positioned themselves as an authority on everything related to travel because of
which people trust the recommendation they receive from OTAs.

 OTAs make it easy to compare different rates for example meta search engines.
 As mentioned in the case of the daily sales of around 150000 air tickets half of
them were sold online mostly through OTA’s.
 Also as mentioned in spite of being the top 2 airlines which was Kingfisher & Jet
airlines still Makemytrip had a better market capitalization compared to them.
 Also the effort which the OTA’s are taking in enhancing the customer experience
right from their marketing campaign in the metro cities to diversifying their
business in hotels, tour packages etc the airline industry is hardly making any
effort towards the same.
 OTAs have invested heavily in conversion-orientated websites to give customers
everything they need to make a booking decision efficiently and with confidence.
  Travelers can go directly to the airline’s website but majority of people go to
OTAs to compare prices and see the whole pool of options.
 Metasearch engines allows OTAs to promote their propositions – for example
websites like Google Flights or Skyscanner aggregate different flight options. For
many OTAs, this is the main source of traffic.

Thus to conclude OTA’s serve the need of the hour and in order for airline industries to
match up with the power which OTA platform has to offer it has to majorly invest in it
variety of functions right from enhancing the technology, customer experience,
marketing, advertising etc.