WHO Part of Gema Lintas Buana (GLB Group), NusaTrip.com was established as an offline corporate travel agency two years ago before launching its OTA operations in March 2013.
NusaTrip.com CEO and founder, Hans Ebenhahn, said: “The GLB Group offers a lot of leverage that helps to keep our operation (costs) low, open many doors and connect us with other strategic partners.
We have a few million US dollars approved for our OTA business, but being part of a group allows us the flexibility to request for extra funding when an opportunity arises,” he added.
WHAT NusaTrip.com claims to be the first OTA in Indonesia to provide instant online bookings for all international airlines and most domestic airlines, as well as offering the largest inventory of some 100,000 hotels worldwide via local payment modes like ATM and online banking.
Said Ebenhahn: “Without NusaTrip, it would be very complicated and time-consuming to find the best price for, say, a Jogjakarta-Milan flight online.
“We also offer Indonesia domestic flights, making it easier for travellers to find (routes and prices of local airlines).”
He added: “We allow people to construct their flight selection – I have not seen any other OTAs anywhere doing it. We show all possible outbound and inbound flights and allow people to select any of them, while recalculating the total cost of the trip. You can check all possible combinations from one page, (so) there is no need to wait for new pages to load or go back and forth between pages.”
WHY Ebenhahn said: “In Indonesia, a vast archipelago, where online payment is slowly becoming a reality, we believe it is key to offer 24/7 ATM payment to our users (with the instant issuance of e-tickets or vouchers). Very few e-commerce players offer this service.
“We support ATM payment with 77 banks in Indonesia, including banks that have ATMs in medium and small villages all around Indonesia.
TARGET NusaTrip.com’s core target is Indonesians travelling within Indonesia or overseas, according to Ebenhahn. Its online solution is tailored for FITs but also accept corporate and group bookings offline by leveraging on its OTA’s back-end system.
“We mostly focus on targeted digital marketing for the moment. Most of our spent is performance-focused, but we will also do branding campaigns,” said Ebenhahn. “We also have many partnerships in the works as well as some social media campaigns that we are still working on.
He added: “We launched just (recently), we are in a very high growth phase, so any numbers we have today will double or triple within a few years or two. It is too early to publish any numbers.
“Our current focus is to increase our brand awareness and get more travellers to experience what a full online travel agency can bring them.”
