Mystifly, which was launched in 2009 as a global air consolidation services company and then changed course in 2011 to a platform play to deliver air content, has come a long way since its early days.
Rajeev Kumar: Mission to help traditional travel agents compete in the online world.
CEO and co-founder, Rajeev Kumar, said that currently it is on the verge of going live with two top global OTAs, and it is also entering China and will feature on three platforms through its local Chinese partner.
He declined to disclose names at this stage, but said that over 2,000 travel organisations were now Mystifly’s platform customers.
He said the company has made good progress with TMCs (travel management companies) and there has also been a shift towards OTAs in the last 12 months.
“Sixteen of the top 30 TMCs in the UK are Mystifly’s customers, as are nine of the top 10 TMCs and tour operators in India. And in the ast 12 months, 62 OTAs in 55 countries now use Mystifly’s consumer APIs,” he said.
The platform sees up to 1,500 segments a day, with the biggest market being the US.
“Any search you want to go from anywhere to anywhere, you will find the cheapest fares on our platform. We cover 70 countries,” he said.
Kumar first got into global air fare consolidation as an idea in 2006 while he was looking for a London-India fare. “The fare Indian agencies quoted me was so high, higher than it would be if I had bought it in London, and that’s when I realised that’s how the industry worked.”
Further research and a few months of technology and process consulting for a travel organisation in the UK helped solidify the idea, and gave birth to Mystifly.
“Large TMCs can set up offices worldwide but thousands of medium and small businesses do not have the resources to do that, but they need global fares to service global and large accounts. I wanted to address those complications,” he said.
It started as an offline model until it knew its future was to create an online platform with an API. It launched its platform in early 2011 and launched the API at the WIT Conference in 2011, and signed its first API customer in June 2012.
It intends to remain focused as a B2B play even though Kumar said it has all the right ingredients to become a B2C business. “The question is if you want to do it at the risk of existing customers.”
Besides, customer acquisition costs in the retail space cannot be justified by a single product company like Mystifly.
Mystifly, which carries multi-GDS content including domestic China, Russia and Turkey, sits on top of GDS’s and pulls in availability, pricing and schedules from airlines.
“The key is we are able to tap into local content. Take Chinese content, local pricing is usually lower – so we carry and tap into those fares for our partners. We also carry multiple fare types, marine, students, labourers.”
He calls Mystifly a meta B2B. His mission is to help traditional travel agents compete in an increasingly online world. “I come from the technology side and I had no idea how GDSs nor how travel agencies worked, but I worked on it from the ground up.”
Self-funded from the beginning, he said the business was profitable from the third month onwards.
“Even though funding in the form of a strategic partner happened in late 2010, I every penny into the operation and didn’t take out any salary or earnings for three years after the inception.”
He plans to start fund-raising shortly and is confident he will achieve his goal with the growth that Mystifly has seen.
“Mystifly has been growing at 80-130% y-o-yin the last five years and is expected to grow 300-400% in 2015-16 with its new OTA and China initiatives,” he said.
• Featured image credit (search tab): Minerva Studio/iStock
