Yahoo! India to offer travel services with partner

Yahoo! India is targeting to offer travel-related services including booking on its portal in India in the next couple of months.

The company is in talks with various service providers and is expected to finalise the deal soon.

George Zacharias, MD, Yahoo! India, said this market in India had huge potential given the kind of business that is being transacted on the net for travel-related services. "We want to be in this space and we should be finalising our partner pretty soon," he said.

The travel space on the internet is growing at a fast clip in India over the past couple of years, with portals such as travelguru, makemytrip and cleartrip making significant inroads in this market.

The rise of this market has also led a global travel portal Travelocity to set up shop in India. It is also learnt that another global major Kayak and expedia is also set to enter Indian shores.

The internet shopping market in India is currently worth close to Rs 3,000 crore and of this 70 per cent is accounted by various travel portals led by IRCTC (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation).

Yahoo! India, which is among the top two in attracting the Indian advertisers onto the Internet, in a market worth close to $60 million, recently invested in BharatMatrimony.com to make this site its preferred partner in India for matrimony-related offerings.

According to industry sources, Yahoo! India might take a similar route of making a strategic investment in an Indian travel portal to expand its travel services here.

Zacharias, however, was not willing to comment on the profile of partner stating that when they finalise it would be made public.

"It may not necessarily be through a strategic investment pact like BharatMatrimony. There are all possibilities and we will sign a win-win deal for both parties," he said.

Yahoo! India has a pact with ebay in India to offer shopping services, a vertical which is still nascent for Yahoo! in India. If and when the pact for travel services fall in place, Yahoo! in India will be offering the entire gamut of services starting from email, search, messenger, job search besides others.