Interview: CheapOAir CEO on Bridging the Gap Between Booking Site and Travel Agent
Skift Take
Hotel site Getaroom.com tried to drive consumers from its Web site to a call centers for up-selling, but the much larger CheapOair is intent on doing both -- perfecting online booking and giving travelers that option, but also prodding them to phone agents in its company-owned call centers.
Editor's Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out here.
Sam Jain is the founder and CEO of Fareportal, which operates two online travel agencies, namely CheapOair, the largest company in the group, and OneTravel.
CheapOair, which is among the top five online travel agencies in the U.S., is a hybrid in that it not only offers online bookings, and has hundreds of engineers dabbling with every aspect of its Web page, but it also owns its own call centers, employing hundreds of agents, and publishes its toll-free number on every page.
Jain believes being a private company that has a small group of decision-makers is a competitive advantage, but on the other hand its hybrid model takes investment to scale. Skift spoke to Jain over dinner recently, and discussed CheapOair's strategic issues, along with his views on the future of travel booking.
Skift: CheapOair was founded in 2005 with a focus on flights. You now have scores or perhaps hundreds of engineers working on tweaking flight bookings on your site. What is so difficult about airline tickets?
Sam Jain: After being in this business for eight years and having a presence in multiple countries, having about 200-plus engineers is very normal and usual because just maintaining millions of lines of code requires a ton of engineers. You have different languages, different countries, different products. We have a huge pipeline of product development. If you design 30 new products only one will actually see the light of day because the rest will either not pass the test or the consumer experience will fail. Very stringent new testing is done.
Skift: Thirty new products? I'm not asking you to give away the secret sauce but how many new products
