A search engine for all ye travellers

INTERNET: Mobissimo promises to make life easier for the travelling Indian.

Don't you just love those sites which throw up fares from multiple airlines on one page? Saves you the trouble of individually trawling these sites.

Now travel will be much more easier with Mobissimo, a US-based meta search engine, which lets you search prices directly from 157 different travel suppliers across the world, based on your search criteria.

Mobissimo, which launched its India website www.mobissimo.in recently, lets you search everything related to travel "" traditional airlines, hotel rooms, car rentals, Indian online travel agencies and low cost carriers across the globe as well as in India.

India, incidentally is the second largest source of business for Mobissimo, and that too without any marketing from them as yet in the country.

"We saw an opportunity in India because the market here is becoming very fragmented with the entry of new travel players. It is getting more complicated for users who now need to search multiple websites," said Beatrice Tarka, co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo.

The company has seen a 35 per cent growth in traffic to its site from India, as compared to 3-4 per cent from the US.

The entry of low cost carriers has managed to bring in a new breed of travellers, which also means a rapidly growing user base for the site.

With plans to invest 10 per cent of its revenue for marketing in India, Mobissimo expects to become the largest travel search website in India by the end of the year.

For travel suppliers like SpiceJet, meta search engines mean another marketing platform, which is very efficiently targeted at Indians and non-Indians.

Says Sanjay Kumar, SpiceJet's associate vice president, marketing and planning: "We won't have to spend our dollars in marketing our product in markets outside India."

SpiceJet is already on Mobissimo meta-search system in India, which costs nothing, and is also considering advertising on the website soon.

MakeMyTrip.com (MMT) has also signed up with Mobissimo and will soon finish integrating its offerings with the new meta search engine.

The US website of MMT is already on the system for the last two years. In India, says co-founder and CMO, Sachin Bhatia, MMT already advertises with Mobissimo.

MMT gets close to 15 per cent of its business through Google, which is a generic search engine. With this focussed search, they expect the conversion to be higher, and hope to get about 8-9 per cent business from Mobissimo in the next one year or so.

One of the best things for you and me, though, are the recommendations left by other travellers. Goa is not the only beach destination in India, there are other heavens you would not have heard of !