Partnership with Travelport will widen IndiGo's global reach

Domestic carrier IndiGo and travel online platform Travelport today announced partnership to distribute the former’s fares and ancillary products to the portal’s customers across 180 countries. Through the partnership, Travelport will be able to expand its reach globally while the online portal will be able to streamline its agents and airline operations. IndiGo's Aditya Ghosh and Travelport's Gordon Wilson, President & CEO speaks to CNBC-TV18 about the partnership and benefits it will bring to both the companies.Below is the transcript of Gordon Wilson and Aditya Ghosh's interview to CNBC-TV18's Ronojoy Banerjee.Q: You have now announced the global services distribution agreement with IndiGo. Viewers may not be that much aware of what Travelport does or what it will mean for Indian airlines like IndiGo. Can you throw some light on that?Wilson: We are in basically in a business to business (B2B) business, we are not a consumer brand. We are the technology that sits behind online and offline travel agencies around the world. We operate in 180 countries around the world, distributing airlines, car rental companies, hotel products, etc. So, what this means for IndiGo is IndiGo now is, as of today, a fully live participant in our system, which means that travel agencies, not just in India, but globally in 180 countries can now see and book in real time all the services IndiGo has to offer. That is both the fares and the availability, but also all the ancillary and the merchandising products that IndiGo offers.Q: Which are the other airlines in India that you currently have a similar arrangement with?Wilson: Virtually all of them. So, Air India, Vistara, Air Asia India and Jet Airways, etc. and also all the big hotel groups in India like Taj and Oyo, etc.Q: So, my logical question would be why did it take IndiGo so long to enter into an agreement like this and if you could spell out what does it have for IndiGo?Ghosh: Actually there are probably two big advantages. The first one as far as IndiGo is concerned is that we are able to now reach a much wider audience, both in India as well as overseas. We are now at a 124 airplanes airline, so certainly not a startup anymore. So, that helps now and as we expand internationally as well, we are now able to reach out to a much wider audience. Somebody sitting in North America, somebody sitting in Europe would be able to go to a travel agent and be able to really easily access IndiGo inventory. So, it is about some 68,000 travel agents that will get access to IndiGo content. The second is that from the travel agents point of view, so far, they would have to toggle screens. They would have to connect to us directly and then access our inventory and then go back to a Galileo screen to be able to access the inventory from other carriers. Now we will be available seamlessly, so for a travel agent, which is a large community which supports us in a big way, this is much easier to sell and access IndiGo products. And as Gordon was saying, it is not limited just to the fares. Now they will be able to access ancillary services whether it is excess baggage and prepaid meals and so on and so forth. But, from an ease of use point of view, it happens automatically. What is kind of significant is that it is not common for low cost carriers to come into this platform, but over a period of time, we saw two great successes, Ryanair, there is easyJet who are on Travelport. So, you learn from the best and that gave us confidence that Travelport has also, over the last few years, gone and re-imvented that part of the connect where we do not have to now connect in the same traditional way that legacy carriers have to. And therefore, we are also not burdened with some of the other obligations and costs that come along with it.Q: Is that the reason why you all took time to enter into this agreement?Ghosh: Absolutely. Both the product, the presence, the size of the market and the cost all came together for us to be able to take this step. Like most things at IndiGo, we spend a lot of time planning and thinking through this, probably much to Gordon's frustration.Q: You all had signed this in September but today it goes live stream. What took so long - two months to get this up and running?Wilson: Two months isn’t very long. What we pioneered as Travelport is different ways of enabling airlines like IndiGo to connect into our platform. This is what you call external API connectivity. We have to write to their API set, we had to make sure that was all fully integrated into our system in a seamless way. So now you can see IndiGo next to Air India, next to other carriers. So, it is all integrated. That just took time in testing properly because you don't want to do anything that is half baked when you are doing a global rollout and it is something new for India which up until now really hasn’t  done anything in this manner ever before. So, two months is actually a credit to the teams at IndiGo and also in Travelport in terms of how we brought that together in this timeframe. Q: What has the experience been so far while working with the other airlines? What have you learnt about the India market?Wilson: We have been in Indian market for about 20 years as Travelport. We are probably one of the best kept secrets in the markets. We are B2B and you don't see us but we have been working in this marketplace for that long. So, we have pretty much know the India market well.I have known Aditya personally for 20 years which has helped in this. Having long term relationship helps. So, understanding the market, being responsive and flexible in terms of how they want to do things is why we were successful with IndiGo, why we are successful with Ryanair and so on.Q: If I were to sit in London and I want to let us say from there I want to make my India bookings, how will that help IndiGo?Ghosh: Till recently when a customer is sitting in London or New York unless there was a travel agent who was directly linked into our system through an API connect, they would literally have to just go to the website. Naturally IndiGo is not as well-known in far away overseas markets as it is known in India. However now that changes overnight because when they go to a travel agent and he says let me look at a flight from Delhi to Mumbai, it won't be just the legacy carriers that will show up as inventory but it will also show up IndiGo and then suddenly you realise here is IndiGo which now has 17 flights a day between Delhi and Mumbai which is probably the same number of flights as a lot of airlines put together  on the other side. So, the frequency and the ability and the choices that the travel agent is able to offer to that customer is manifold than what was available earlier.So, it is almost like we had a product and then we had a thick veil over it and suddenly it has become clear vision where he is able to see all our inventories, all our products and everything. So, to the customer he is able to access our inventories literally just like he would access anybody else's.Watch video for more.....