Here’s how it works: New deals, offering a limited number of seats for each destination, are posted weekly and are live for five days.To get these deals you just have to purchase within the five-day time frame, and convince at least five others to purchase them too.

They can be family members, friends, colleagues or anyone whom you think may be interested in being a “groupie” with you to the offered destinations.

TripGroupy also makes it easy for you to share the deals via social media – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin – through the site’s fully integrated platform. The deal is on once all seats have been sold. You will then receive a confirmation email asking you to link back to the site where they will confirm your details, and complete payment. An itinerary from AirAsia will be sent to you.

Currently the deals are only for one-way tickets, but return flight deals are in the works. The discounted all-in fares are about 40%-60% cheaper than other online offers. They are exclusively on AirAsia flights to its destinations in ASEAN, China, India, and Australia.

Arun Verma

“Essentially TripGroupy is a group-buying flight site. Our idea is that we can open up travel to different segments through this business model. Right now we are piloting it in Kuala Lumpur, and if it works we will roll out to all the major airports in South East Asia,” said Arun Verma, AirAsia’s head of technology and innovation.

On any concerns that this new model could impact on AirAsia’s yields, and that it Is educating customers to book even later (within the five day booking frame), he answered, “This is targeted to entice spontaneous travellers or people who would not have travelled  – through group buying we accomplish that. It is incremental business.”

And it appears that TripGroupy is already a hit even though it is newly launched. When WIT visited the site, which is still in beta, to check what deals were available, we were greeted not with photos of destinations and attractive price tags but this message: “All flights sold out! … But we hear the message loud and clear: more flights!
 Check back tomorrow to see our latest round of flight deals!”

Obviously TripGroupy’s “viral” marketing strategy via social media platforms is working. Perhaps the only problem is it may not be able to put out as many deals as its groupies would want.