INDONESIA’S online travel landscape is heating up with the recent launch of NusaTrip.com, which claims to be the first OTA in the country to provide instant online bookings for all international and most domestic airlines, as well as the largest inventory of hotels worldwide.
Part of Gema Lintas Buana (GLB Group), NusaTrip.com first started as an offline corporate travel agency two years ago before launching its OTA operations last month.
NusaTrip.com CEO and founder, Hans Ebenhahn, explained that convenient bookings could be made for routes that had both a domestic and international leg.
He said: “Without NusaTrip, it would be very complicated and time-consuming to find the best price for, say, a Jogjakarta-Milan flight online…Some international OTAs might have return flights out of Indonesia but the fares are expensive because they do not have access to the Indonesian market fares.
“We also offer domestic flights, making it easier for travellers to (search for) routes and prices that a (local) airline flies to.”
According to Ebenhahn, NusaTrip.com is also the first OTA in Indonesia to include 100,000 hotels worldwide for instant online booking via local payment modes like ATM and online banking.
He added: “Our core target is Indonesians travelling within the country or overseas. Our online solution is tailored for FITs but we also accept corporate and group bookings offline by leveraging our OTA’s back-end system.”
When enquired about the business target for this year, he said: “Having just launched, we are in a very high-growth phase, so any numbers we have today will double or triple within (a couple of months)…Our current focus is to increase our brand awareness and get more travellers to experience what a full OTA can bring.”
Mobile applications are also in the works as the Indonesian Internet usage is mainly mobile, said Ebenhahn. “Our current site has been designed to be fully functional with tablets; our first step in mobile is a HTML5 version to cater to all smartphone devices, followed by Android and Blackberry apps.”
