SpiceJet one of India’s budget carrier announced that it had acqui-hired the team and technology of Travenues, a Bengaluru-based airline e-commerce technology company that has several innovative products for airline e-commerce in its kitty.
Travenues, which was launched a year ago, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of India’s leading AI-based travel app ixigo. A team founded the technology platform with decades of experiences across GDS, OTA and meta-search business to improve passenger customer experience.
Ashish Vikram, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of SpiceJet said “We are glad to welcome Team Travenues to SpiceJet. This acqui-hire will help SpiceJet strengthen its e-commerce platforms as we continue to innovate across multiple technology areas and achieve our vision of being the worldwide leader in aviation technology.”
Aloke Bajpai, co-founder, ixigo.com, described the acqui-hire as a win-win. “We thought of this, as we wanted to focus entirely on our B2C business, and thought it would take considerable effort and investments to sign up more airlines and scale up our B2B offerings through Travenues,” he said. Bajpai revealed Ixigo does not have plans to scale up Travenues for a year. He told the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed back plans for the travel industry by a couple of years. Bajpai shared the company’s ideas of focusing on travel bookings, which have bounced back to 25- 30% of pre-COVID19 levels.
Now SpiceJet will use the airline technology and commerce platform to its advantage. Travenues had signed up its first technology partnership with SpiceJet for digital transformation in 2019. It also developed the airline’s booking apps and mobile website.
