Flipkart is planning to take over one of the oldest travel booking portals of India, called Cleartrip. Flipkart’s idea behind this was to strengthen the competition as the Walmart, which is also an online retailer continues to make its strategic investment across sectors to improve its business profile and also build an ecosystem around it. The deal with Cleartrip will be around $40 million, which is considered to be a distress sale for the 15-year-old Mumbai firm, because of the pain which has been caused due to the pandemic situation, inflicted on the travel and hospitality industry. The deal may soon get official, and the final figure of the deal might soon be revealed. Concur Technologies, a provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, DAG Ventures and Gund Investment are few of the cleartrip investors. Kleiner Perkins, Sherpalo Ventures and DFJ were also few of the early investors for cleartrip who backed out at early stage of business.
Cleartrip was founded in 2006 by Hrush Bhatt, Matthew Spaice and Stuart Crighton as an air travel booking, and hotels booking marketplace. GoIbibo and Make my Trip were its biggest competitors. Flipkart now wants to invest in the Cleartrip and give an upthrust to its business. This might toughen the competition in the Booking sector and might intensify the sector to a great extent in coming future. Cleartrip used to only concentrate on the air booking and not on the hotel bookings in the past. With this acquisition, there might be the company’s plan to put their hands in the hotel booking too. Cleartrip suffered a lot last year and had to lay off 400-500 employees during the pandemic situation. Clear almost suffered a loss of 14 crores in the year 2020. Backend engine of Cleartrip will start to power Flipkart’s travel and hotel bookings.
Flipkart and Amazon, which are considered as the two major e-commerce firms and competitors of each other are aggressively pushing hotel and travel bookings on their sites as they segment themselves into new services, including e-pharmacy, food delivery, and selling financial products online. Ninjakart, a supply-chain startup for fresh produce of Flipkart is on radar of Flipkart, and the company has doubled down its investment on it. Flipkart also bagged down a logistic startup known as ShadowFax, which had a $60-million investment round to accelerate hyperlocal deliveries. ShadowFax helped Flipkart to improvise its portfolio and gain a steady place in the online booking market to compete with its rivals.
