Rudi Weissmann (keft) with Gunesh Raj

His goal remains unwavering from those early days – to give the end user the best fares from anywhere to anywhere, something he says OTAs are promising but are not delivering fully.

In tiss.com, his major success was getting consolidators to cooperate and this is what he’s attempting again with a resurrection of fare.net, a business under his new company The Content Farmer.

Fare.net was the forerunner of Sprice, the Asian-based meta search company that was sold to Travelport. Before the acquisition, circa 2007, it merged with Coelis of France and raised US$10 million – Weissmann exited after the merger, and before the acquisition.

Officially, he doesn’t go into too much details about what happened there but soon after that, he and his family moved to Kuching, Sarawak, a lifestyle decision.

Today, he and Gunesh Raj (pictured above), a Malaysian developer he’s worked with for several years and who was a co-founder of Sprice, are the sole partners of this new business which he describes as a “meta find” – as opposed to you searching for the best fares, this engine will find the best fares for you.

“The Internet community is getting bigger and bigger – there are now so many websites, it’s hard for customers to see through them and find the right information.”

With fare.net, three weeks into launch, he’s aggregating low cost air fares and the best fares from travel agents in each country and “we let them compete in our system”.

“We show the lowest fares from any airline, we want to give customers the best deals. We’re not promoting any agent or any airline. Our issue is not to show a high turnover – we will charge $2 per booking – this is not a path to IPO.

“Having done IPOs before, when people from outside the company get involved, truth can become a shadow.”

As well as a customer-facing site, fare.net, now three weeks into launch, will give agents an interface. “If you’re a Singapore agent, how do you know you have the best fares from Bangkok to London? Now you can look that up in our system. Agents can then do their own mark-ups and sell the fares on their own website.”

The demo website, www.fare.net, shows what content it brings to the table. “With our API and all the functions, you can integrate the fares in your existing system and still follow your own work flow and display. On our API, we just provide the data, booking, payment and ticketing process including mark-up system,” said Weissmann. 

Currently, Content Farmer provides negotiated fares from 82 consolidators out of 63 countries and low cost fares from 137 budget airlines worldwide.

He said the idea of flight search was counter-intuitive because search engines like Google or meta searches earn with each click and so it’s not in their interests to make search super efficient.

“The meta search looks for fares, they are not responsible for fares and they don’t allow booking, they earn on clicks – the more clicks, the better for them.

“Consolidators play their own game – they give meta search the lowest fare but when customers make the booking, they can’t find the fare.”

He said the online travel business had become much more complex in the last two decades – new players and new investors whose interest it is to make money but not necessarily to look after the customers.

“With our system, everyone can be an OTA – just take our product. You can then layer additional content to differentiate your offering.”

He acknowledges that while much has changed in the last two decades and that online travel is a young man’s game, there’s no substitute for experience and knowledge, he said. Combine that with good technology and he says, the blend is unbeatable.

Gunesh’s background covers Asia Travel Mart, AirAsia and Japan Travel Bureau.

With fare.net, the pain point to solve is payments. “The payment issue is always the hardest. The supplier has its own payment system, the travel agent has their own – we have to overcome credit card issues. If the payment doesn’t go through, we don’t make any money. There is no room for error.”

Said Weissmann, “My dream remains the same – to get the best air fares out of every country. It was stopped by business circumstances. At its peak, we were selling 20,000 tickets a day and Travelocity used us for five years.

“We want to cover 230 countries and to integrate every low cost carrier in the world.”

There’s definitely an obsessiveness about Weissmann that makes you believe he will do it. Gunesh said, “You won’t believe how obsessive he is with detail. He goes through the fares everyday for quality control and does comparisons with other websites.”

So Weissmann is a man with a mission. “To be a survivor in the travel business, you have to understand the rules, the yes and nos of the business – know the right sources, have good relationships.

“Experience and networks, they don’t come when you are born. The young have the advantage of the environment but not the knowledge.

“Of course with technology, you can get more customers. I am so old I don’t understand that bit but I can teach people how the travel business works and they teach me how to build up the database and interface.”

Chipped in Gunesh, “Yes, he gives me the wisdom, I give him the technology.”