SAYONI BHADURI – Chennai
Online bus ticket aggregation company TicketGoose.com is looking at reaching a turnover of INR 3000 crore in five years time. Arun Athiappan, co-founder and CEO, TicketGoose.com said, “e believe that we will reach this figure, when we should be booking around one lakh tickets a day.” In 2011-12 the turnover for the company was INR 22.5 crore and for 2012 – 13 they project a turnover of INR 50 crore.
Discussing investments in the company Athiappan informed that the company has invested close to INR seven crore in building the portal and establishing their B2B networks. “B2C has been mostly through word of mouth. We are looking at investing heavily on the B2C segments and garnering a significant market and mind share,” he added. TicketGoose.com currently works with close to 750 operators pan India and connecting about 4482 cities/small towns across the country.
TicketGoose.com is also in talks with the concerned authorities at the state transport corporation to include their bus network, “However working with the government has its own challenges and when they have their own web portal for the respective states, and it becomes even more challenging for the tie-up. And even on the customer base that we cater too, it will be a completely different customer profile that we would be catering if we get into this model, however our product development team is working on the same,” said Athiappan.
The company’s in-house sales force is spread across the major cities in south India – Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune who rope in channel partners. “For direct online sales, we concentrate on the corporate and college students. With corporate we have attractive schemes, group travel options, dedicated services, and with students we have a well thought out branding plan that involves creating business opportunities to students, making them young entrepreneurs,” he explained.
