TravTalk India Online Magazine
Riya Travels and Tours has seen an impressive website growth of around 15-16 per cent year-on-year. Now in its 11th year of being active in the B2B space, Riya Group is seeing a lot more of its partners coming online and this has a lot to do with the unique features that the company has introduced on its portal.
Hazel Jain
Riya Travels has always attempted to introduce new features and developments for its agents, reveals Manoj Samuel, Director, Riya Group, whether it is offline or online. He says that the company has seen its B2B website grow aggressively over the years. “On a year-on-year basis, it has roughly been around 15-16 per cent growth. It has been 11 years now and we can see a lot more of our partners coming online. Currently, we have around 30,000 partners online,” Samuel reveals.
Speaking about the added benefits that Riya is offering its agent partners, he says, “Riya has always tried to come up with new features and developments for our agents. We have recently added travel insurance on our online portal which was otherwise only available offline. We also have Queue Ticketing, a transactional module where travel partners can queue their PNRs to us, retrieve the PNR on this module and issue the ticket through our IATA-accredited website. This benefits the travel partners to retain their segments and earn commission on these tickets. There is no dependency of sending email and calls for ticket issuance, or any other manual interference. Refunds and cancellations will also be accepted from this module.” Through ‘Queue Ticketing’, agents can do ticketing without depending on anyone from the company.
Riya Connect adds value
Riya connect started as a lone flight seller and today, it offers a bouquet of travel products under one roof. It also offers a range of ancillary services like real-time ticketing status with the convenience of seat and meal selection. “We are not stopping here; we are constantly trying to come up with new things to make everything easy for our agents. We have something called the ancillary services which nobody else in the industry has. It has services like meals, baggage, etc – everything other than your main booking. Today, we are dealing with B2B so when they do the booking they don’t waste their time in doing the baggage, meals, etc. We have given them an option to do it separately once the main booking is done,” he says.
This is also online and there is no need to call up the call centre for this or call the airline or travel agent through whom the booking has been made. Riya also has travel insurance on Riya Connect and is working on a few other things that will be added soon. “We will soon be coming up with new trade activities. We also have plans to add new features to Riya connect and promote Riya Business Travel. We have also decided to try a lot of new things this year,” Samuel adds.
We have Queue Ticketing, a transactional module where travel partners can queue their PNRs to us, retrieve the PNR on this module and issue the ticket through our IATA-accredited website
