Traveloka, which recently raised Series-A funding with Global Founders Capital, a new VC set up by Rocket Internet, is looking to cement its position to become the leading online flight booking in Indonesia.

Co-founder, Ferry Unardi (pictured left) said with the funds (he declined to disclose the amount), it’d be looking to add to its 40-people strong team and add more services to become a full-service OTA.

Traveloka initially started as a meta-search. “My co-founders and I all have engineering backgrounds. When we decided to do something, we wanted something that was technically challenging and useful enough for most people.

“Hence we were initially drawn to travel metasearch since we thought there was already a need for such service.”

However, after a few months, the team thought the metasearch model might be a little early for the market.

“A lot of our customers are first-time online bookers and offering a simple booking experience is key to winning these customers. So we decided to attack the core problem and improve our booking path by offering direct booking.”

As for how he intends to differentiate from competitors such as tiket.com, nusatrips.com and ezytravel.co.id, he said, “I don’t think we need to differentiate that much as the market is far from being mature.

“Offering accessible, consistent, reliable, and comprehensive service with competitive price is something that is far from being solved and we are focusing on that.”

The switch to an OTA model seems to have worked, he said. “Within the first two months of doing direct bookings, we went from selling zero to thousands of seats a day. We are happy with our performance, but the potential ahead is much bigger, so we need to stay focused.”

One clear trend he is seeing is that “a lot more people are actually willing to try online booking for the first time compared to last year. But not a lot of them are tech-savvy, so we need to adjust our service to accommodate these first time bookers.”

“The migration to online booking in travel industry is happening rapidly and we want to be the most reliable and trusted service for them. For flight, it is difficult to achieve since there is no local GDS and we’re continuously working on improving it.”