Why did you launch Travelocity in India, instead of Zuji, the brand meant for the Asia Pacific market?
Though India is a part of Asia, the orientation is more Western. In a quick dip stick, we found that the brand recall for Travelocity was higher and there were a few thousand people each month who were already visiting Travelocity from India and bookings were being recorded. Why didn’t you buy an Indian company to enter this market like you did in Europe and Asia Pacific? We did the due diligence on a few possible opportunities. But for the time being we decided to go for organic growth. This does not rule out the possibility in the future. The existing players in India are funded by venture capitalists. We bought out lastminute.com in Europe. More recently, we bought out all the airlines’ shares with whom we had launched Zuji. So now, it is fully owned by us. As a late entrant, how do you hope to break into the market of established players? We have a presence in 40 countries, so we have a more varied experience. We have the products in place, so we don’t need to build it from scratch
