“We survived, now ready to thrive,” says Rajeev Kumar on 12th (no, second) anniversary
IT may be Mystifly’s 12th anniversary but to founder Rajeev Kumar and co-founder Bharat Goyal, it feels more like its second year “because we went back to zero” when the pandemic devastated its B2B flights business.
“We survived and we are now ready to thrive,” Rajeev declared from the office in Bangalore which Mystifly still maintains even though all its 140 staff are working remotely.
He confesses though that unlike really starting from zero, starting from Zero.0 (as it were) is harder because “you’ve got baggage, legacy, you can’t do it at the same pace as before”. “It’s easy to scale down, hard to scale up and you have to take that call – to what extent do you cut down so you can build up?”
For Mystifly, instead of cutting back on people entirely, it adapted its business – it set up a new call centre division which is contributing new revenues, staffed it with 200 people, continued to invest in tech and product and launched a new platform called “Azygos” to enable non-travel players such as superapps, fintech’s and marketplaces to sell air easily.
“The whole airline ecosystem – airline APIs, GDS APIs – assumes you have to be an expert in travel, to have a deep understanding of how the industry works, and now with every airline at different stages of NDC, it’s even more complicated. What we have done is create a framework to simplify airline integration on an aggregated platform level, so that anyone can start selling travel as a category in no time.”
Thus far, 35 airlines have gone live on the aggregated platform. He compared its platform to “like an operating system”, where any brand – banks, fintech’s, superapps, marketplaces – that want to add flights, can do so easily. “Consumers expect an Amazon-like model, you want to book, one click you get a refund and couple of clicks to change” and Mystifly enables that, he said.
“Tech is only one part of it, you need content and content agreements with the airlines and automated fullfillment,” he added. “They can choose which part of the services they want –Aggregation, Look to Book optimisation, revenue management, revenue optimisation, managing currency & FX, payments. We have also enhanced the shopping capability of our API offering structured data with 400 airlines very similar to an ecommerce platform experience.”
Said Rajeev, “We’ve seen non-travel brands come into our space and this will only continue and we want to make it easier for them to sell flights because as we all know, selling flights is highly complex. It’s getting even more complex with each year.”
While OTAs and other travel intermediaries remain its bread and butter, this new enhancement allows Mystifly to expand its market reach to superapps and fintech’s in South-east Asia and Europe, meta search platforms, and marketplaces, he said. “Airlines with strong consumer apps can also access this platform to offer other airline content to retain mindshare.”
This is one reason why it built a “change and cancellation model” within the platform and added a service layer to support this feature – humans that would help with the last mile in case tech fails. “There’s still a lot of manual intervention needed in travel – maybe 10-15% of the process still needs human intervention, and while we were doing this, we saw an opportunity to offer this service to existing customers.”
As Mystifly sees it, there are three different pillars to be addressed in solving flights – distribution, fulfilment and payments. When they started Mystifly in 2009, it was to solve the first global fulfillment and over the years, it tackled distribution. Now leaves the third pillar to be solved. he said, adding they planned to have this layer ready by October.
In July 2020, it raised US$3.3m from existing investor Recruit Holdings in pre-Series B funding. “That was at the peak of the crisis and that helped us considerably. With the passion and commitment co-founder Bharat has brought to the business, as well as that of the team, we will come out of it stronger.
“In general, investors during these testing don’t think travel is a place to be right now but the notion that “airlines do not need intermediaries” is fanciful. It is impossible to justify that thinking. If anything, it’s even more complex now.”
The good news is, it had its first profitable month in June, after a first half of ups and downs, in tandem with how the pandemic was playing out globally. With a global mix of business, Mystifly was able to ride with the crisis. “Our diverse customer base helped a lot, we got a little bit here and there which contributed collectively to a certain minimum revenue to keep us going”.
Commenting on Etraveli Group’s Mathias Hedlund’s comments made at the WiT Travel Roadshow on the fact that “only a few can be globally competitive”, Rajeev said the world was made up of local, regional and global players. “Mathias is absolutely right. Global flights is a complex world. But, at the same time, not every OTA or travel intermediary wants to be a global business, some are deeply local, some are regional.”
With new emerging airline retailers like superapps, there is a great possibility for local and regional plays, he said.
Mystifly’s mission remains to build a global anywhere to anywhere platform that is multi-currency, multi-source, multi-point of sale. “Because the architecture is a global B2B business, we can support the aspirations of any player, global, regional or local. We can help start or grow an airline retailing business.”
He estimates Mystifly’s existing business is roughly 60% from global OTA’s, and the rest are regional and local. Now it wants to expand the net to include those who want to start flights.
For Rajeev, even in the darkest moments of the pandemic, there was never any thought of giving up on travel or Mystifly. “My life changed when I flew for the first time. It was to Jakarta and I saw a completely different world. For everyone, flying carries so much emotion and purpose, it connects people.”
