Helping travel startups with technology solutions across four continents: Trawex’s story
The brainchild of Abraham Mathews, Trawex is an international travel technology company which serves travel companies across four continents. Trawex platform is powered by 70 plus suppliers across flights, hotels, cars, sightseeing, vacations and other ground services.
It aspires to build a dedicated online booking technology platform to give travel companies, startups in the travel industry, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to enhance their vision and online strategy to a wider audience.
“Online travel can be highly profitable. However, with very high technology costs, small and mid-size travel professionals are limited with few options and end up mainly as affiliates of large OTAs with narrow margins,” says Abraham. Trawex has decided to change this and is geared to empower online travel companies and entrepreneurs.
Beginning
There was a gap in the traditional travel industry, and it was possible to offer more tailored and client-centric services as compared to other travel technology companies, outlines Lijoy. “Our investors agreed to the idea as they were aware of the dynamics and scope of the sector and the opportunity that existed in the space,” he adds.
The company didn’t turn down any business that came their way, however small the project. “We were lucky to find couple of those opportunities. From there it was no turning back,” he says.
Lijoy has over a decade of experience in travel operations and client servicing. Prior to founding Trawex, he worked with American Express India as their lead travel consultant for seven years.
USPs and differentiators
No other company offers comparable supplier selection at such a low licensing cost. “Travel industry is currently in search of viable mobile and social applications. Presently, a large amount of travel entrepreneurs are limited to low-margin affiliate options, and are looking for growth opportunities and technology solutions,” points out Abraham.
Trawex developed its solution to allow travel agencies of any size and classification, whether professional or home-based, to gain direct access to resources of hundreds of thousands of hotels, hundreds of airlines and car rental companies, while maintaining high profit margin and low investment risks. The company’s USPs include improving connections with customers with seamless integration, faster booking, and single operations window to reduce transaction handling time.
Its major clientele base consists of Skytours Holidays, Maldives and VIPHotelz, Malaysia. “Some of the major work accomplished by us includes XML integration capability which today enables us to instantly scale our resource integration, while the typical connection of new XMLs is done based on a request from client or supplier,” adds Abraham.
Challenges on the way
Beginning with a pre-release stage for its product building required Trawex to find corporate early funders in an industry deeply troubled by global financial instability. “To find those partners was a very difficult process, but the investment was well-worth it. Early adopters enjoyed not only amazingly low licensing costs for a great system, but were also given a unique opportunity to take part in the actual design of the system,” says Abraham.
Size of opportunity & road ahead
According to the World Tourism and Travel Council, the value of the online travel market is more than $500 billion US.
Trawex plans to offer its clients complementing social and mobile applications. “We think it is going to have a very significant impact, and will provide travel entrepreneurs with a competitive edge,” says Abraham.