Unfortunately, after six months, the site crashed, said founder Eric Tjetjep. “We had too much traffic, we had no manpower at the time, we thought it was just a hobby.”
Two years later, the site was resurrected and soft launched in September 2011 and since then, it’s been slowly but surely gathering momentum, said Eric.
Ezytravel sells airline tickets, both domestic and international, and packages. It does not offer hotels, perhaps in deference to its partnership in rajakamar.com, the hotel-only site, with the Panorama and Smailing group.
But Eric said he felt a single purpose model would work better. “Most OTAs do both – hotels and flights – and sometimes having two teams is not efficient,” he said.
“We are the only OTA that does fulfillment – you search, you book, we fulfill,” he added. Up to 80% of fulfillment is done offline, a characteristic of the still fledgling Indonesian ecommerce market where credit card transactions are low and payments mainly made by bank transfers or cash on delivery.
“Most Indonesians still prefer to call although we are educating them to go online,” said Eric. One way it is doing this is by offering cheaper air fares if they book online.
Eric admits there is an advantage to being part of the Dwidaya group, the second largest travel agency in Indonesia. Dwidaya Tour & Travel was established on July 19, 1967, by his father and grandfather. Eric came into the business in 2003 to look after finance and technology. His brother Chris took over the reins as CEO in 1999.
He came into travel reluctantly at first “but now I’ve got used to it”, he said. “When Chris came in, he implemented a lot of new things and when I came in 2003, I introduced centralized solutions, set up a better supply chain and a centralised reporting system.”
The group has over 650 staff in 23 locations in Jakarta and nine locations in the cities of Bali, Semarang, Salatiga, Solo, Jogjakarta. It is also part of the Global Star travel management alliance.
Ezytravel has 35 staff and the bulk of business is currently domestic tickets. On international routes, some of the business comes from universities making group bookings for teachers.
Eric said the company is now more prepared to face any challenges unlike two years ago. “It is imperative for us to go online. Although we are a nation-wide business with retail outlets throughout the country, an online play will help us scale and cover all of Indonesia. We are the only traditional travel agency that has an online presence for tickets.”
“We are learning through trial and error,” he added. “We created a mobile app for both Blackberry and Android but it’s not being picked up – yet people say everything is mobile. So we have to wait and see if it’s more hype than anything.”
One thing that’s working is social media to increase its customer base and awareness and it runs competitions on Facebook and Twitter. “We have people asking for fares on our Facebook page.”
In terms of marketing, they started with offline advertising using radio, newspapers and magazine. “We did this for six months and found it didn’t work. Then we started advertising on Google and we got 10,000 hits a day.”
He has been surprised and encouraged by the growth in the online travel market. Up to 80% of its customers are from Jakarta. “We were slightly surprised by that because we expected more users from outside the city,” he said.
“We are excited by this foray into online. This is no longer a hobby but a business. Sooner rather than later, Indonesia will be ready for ecommerce and we intend to be at the lead.”
The hardest thing to manage, he admits, is “differentiating between family and business – you can’t mix relationships and business – so we have to be sensitive to that”.
