Abacus gives ‘net’ gain to agents
As Abacus announced the most radical product roll-out in the company’s history at the International Conference in Abu Dhabi, Martin Symes, Chief Marketing Officer, Abacus International, in a chat with , says they are committed to contribute to the profita
How important is the Indian market for your business?
The India market is a hugely significant market for us, it’s a market that presents significant amount of opportunity for us. A significant amount of time in our head office and a good chunk of our resources are built in to supporting the Indian team. We have a very good team on the ground in India and we have regular interaction with them on customer acquisition and then delivering products. So, we see India as a hugely important market.
How is Abacus helping India’s travel agents build presence and gain share?
We are helping agents drive profitable growth by keeping their profits in check through helping them with produc- tivity and efficiency which is critical. Making things as productive as possible is critical. The vast majority of Abacus’ revenue comes from selling air, that’s growing. But I’m also interested in trying to grow our other sources of revenue as well. What we are trying to do is to package together non air products that have highly competitive pricing, attractive remuneration for agents and are sellable and through the same workflow that agents use to work. If we can do all these, then we can over the time start building up the non air side of our business and at the same time, deliver incremental revenue to the agents, allow agents to compete better with the online guys particularly in the hotel space, we can perhaps level the playing field for the content perspective by giving these guys the ability to get content priced at the same level as the online giants.
We can facilitate to get them into the same space for starters, how they then market themselves, how they attract customers, what content they make available through their apps is still to some extent up to them, although we can help them with the content. Our job is to provide them with tools to allow them to compete as much as possible, but the actual execution of the competition is still down to them.
What impact will the new technologies presented at the conference have in India?
Today when a customer books air through an agent ,he/she may book a hotel through an OTA, what we are allow-
We are here to support our agents, our success is functional around our agency customers surviving and thriving. How we contribute to their revenue growth opportunities and to their profitability and efficiency is the thought which we apply to any product development
ing them to do is allow the agent to say, ‘I also have a very competitive hotel product to go along with your flight, would you like that? Do you also need travel insurance?’ And we are allowing them to do all this in the same workflow, to make things a lot easier. We are not talking about putting them online that’s still within the B2B desktop environment. Some of the products showcased at the Abu Dhabi Conference seem more like B2B2C products. Is Abacus thinking of foraying into the B2C domain?
There’s been no strategic change in that thinking but then ‘Never Say Never’. However, there has been no substantial discussion around the management table about us getting into the B2C space. So what we are here to do is support our agents, our success is functional around our agency customers surviving and thriving. How we contribute to their revenue growth opportunities and how do we contribute to their profitability and efficiency is the thought which we apply to any product development that we do.