BCCL Invests in Travelmasti

BCCL has acquired a stake in Travelmasti Holidays Pvt. Ltd., a company which provides Internet based travel related services to domestic/inbound tourists and corporates for their conferences.Their portal “www.travelmasti.com” offers online reservations for more than 3000 hotels, resorts & serviced apartments across India and is rapidly expanding into the overseas markets.

Travelmasti.com's industry leading hotel content enjoys lead search engine rankings giving it significant organic internet traffic. The company is now looking at exploiting this position to grow beyond the domestic market & scale up its model in the international market. With huge investments in Indian hospitality, the industry is set for explosive growth and Travelmasti is well poised to benefit from the same.

The business mix is currently comprised of domestic clients (60%), inbound clients (25%) and corporate conference clients (15%). Online travel offers immense potential as a sector, though at present it comprises a mere 2.2% of the domestic travel market. domestic travel market. The Online travel industry grew at 126% from a base of $ 295 million in 2005 to $ 796 million in 2006. In 2007, it is expected to record a 66% growth to be a $ 1,325 million industry and by 2008 it will grow at 51% to be a $2004 million industry.

Travelmasti’s business model is to have a multi pronged strategy in order to ensure both growth and profitability while building a reliable and sustainable income stream. The organization is investing aggressively in the portal development, provisions for online hotel reservations along with GDS tie-ups for airline reservations. The portal enhancements will align for growth in inbound, outbound and corporate conferences market.

Travelmasti’s strategy is to generate more eye-balls by using its current strength of having the biggest travel related content on India and thus more business in the process. It is already serving between 1.3 - 2 million page views per month with 6,000 to 10,000 unique visitors a day. Their association with BCCL will further strengthen its plans.

According to Mr. Manan Aggarwal, COO, “BCCL and Travelmasti are a perfect fit for each other. BCCL’s presence as shareholders will bring in tremendous value and help Travelmasti in it’s quest to take it’s business to the next level. Our association with BCCL has come at the right time and would prove to be an important milestone in the life of our company.”

About BCCL
Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. Is India's largest media group also known as the Times Group. The group is the publisher of leading newspapers such as The Times of India, The Economic Times & Navbharat Times. It also operates RadioMirchi and TV channels such as Zoom and TimesNow. The group's portal www.Indiatimes.com is amongst the leading internet portals in the world.

About Travelmasti
For further information on Travelmasti please visit www.travelmasti.com.