BOTTOMLINE: Journeymart.com is a one-stop travel shop for travellers and industry

Take a virtual tour before going on a journey

Manika Gupta

If you want to know which travel agent can offer you the best discount, which airline to take, where to stay, when to go and what to take along with you, which banks and money changers to deal with once you reach the destination, then log on to journeymart.com. It’s a one-stop travel shop. The owners of journeymart.com may not have realised it, but they have been flirting with a new trend called travel Internet.

It’s a cyberspace where travel service providers from all segments can set up shop and offer their products online. The service is complete with a comprehensive online reference manual that offers travel information, world weather, currency conversion, real-time flight details and airline and hotel bookings and the hotels. It even provides you information on weights and measures, media availability and health norms. Whether you are a traveller or a trader, on a business or a pleasure trip, journeymart.com has an instant solution for everyone.

Says Ms Anita Vasudeva, executive director of Interzign Solutions, which has set up the portal: “Compare it to the big mall, which has everything in it ranging from eateries to brand stores.”

journeymart.com scores over the existing travel sites which are either online travel agencies or horizontal portals with tie-ups with preferred partners or fulfillers as they are called in travel terminology. Browsing through these sites means that the Internet-user has to go through a lot of clutter to find the right travel package.

In contrast, journeymart.com is for the traveller as well as the hospitality industry ranging from hotels, airlines, car rental companies, cruise liners, and foreign exchange dealers to just about anybody connected with the trade.

journeymart.com has created infrastructure for people to conduct business directly. The arrangements with traders vary depending upon the requirement. If you don’t have a website, build a journeystore, customise it with your own corporate identity. If you already have a website, link it through journeymart.com.

Little wonder, the response has been good—and the portal expects it to improve further. “It is expected to be overwhelming,” says Ms Vasudeva. “Virtually everyone across the board has evinced interest in the site. And Jet Airways has already tied up for a link up through the website,” adds Mr Gurjit Arora, another executive director.

To support such a huge e-marketplace for travel, journeymart.com has tie-ups with industry’s best technology and channel partners.
It has been hosted on Intel Online, which hosts sites like the US Army, American Stock Exchange, Kodak, Virgin Airlines, Sony, BBC, Yahoo for Australia and New Zealand. ICICI is providing the payment gateway for the site, to conduct the B2B operations.