NusaTrip Claims to be the First Indonesian Travel Site to Offer Instant Online Booking Worldwide

The Indonesian travel industry is like a growing tree. With so many new players entering, we can only watch whether they will die off or grow. Here comes NusaTrip, a new player based in Jakarta that entered the industry in March. NusaTrip has a database of 100,000 hotels and more than 460 domestic and international airlines, targeting to lead the online travel service market in the country

Focusing on flights

NusaTrip claims to be the first online travel agency to offer online flight booking worldwide in Indonesia because it covers not only domestic airlines and hotels but also international flight services and hotels. Try looking for an international flight from Indonesia to the US or London, and NusaTrip will help you to compare all the fares in rupiah.

Compared to other big players in the country like Tiket, NusaTrip works with more Indonesian airline companies, such as Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air. NusaTrip is in talks with Air Asia now. But I think it needs to have a mobile booking application first in order to challenge Tiket’s revenue.

”This is not a short-term play”

The CEO and founder of NusaTrip, Hans Ebenhahn has been working in the e-commerce industry his entire career with his own startups in Europe; then he worked for eBay in Silicon Valley and Singapore. With his working background and experiences, he is confident that he can lead NusaTrip to achieve a lot of things this year. Hans explains, “Our sales are doing very well and our growth rate is still high, we should reach one million monthly visits next month.” That number is excluding the traffic boost NusaTrip will get thanks to the upcoming Eid Al-Fitr holiday. He adds, “We have been very busy perfecting our back-end and making sure our operation runs smoothly. We get some very positive feedback from our customer, between our great prices, positive user experience and quality of service.”

We also asked about his thoughts on what it takes to survive in Indonesia’s competitive online travel industry. Hans answers:

We are not bootstrapping this business. We have built from the ground up a fully operational travel agency business with corporate customers in order to have a enough volume to get our online business started. This allowed us to offer International online travel in Indonesia. We are the only one selling domestic as well as international flights and hotels in Indonesia. From a landscape perspective we seem to be the most committed player in the online travel space.

Obviously the online travel industry still has a long way to go in Indonesia, this is not a short-term play. Effective conversion rates are still low compared to other markets. Customers are slowly getting more confident to buy online. The competitive pressure is growing rapidly and the international hotel incumbent online players had close to no competition from Indonesia in the past. Bottom line: no one knows what will happen.

As for the upcoming plan, NusaTrip has a long product roadmap to strengthen its product offerings, content, payment, distribution, and social marketing. In the near future, the team is planning to have a good mobile app and more partners.

(See also: Nine Top Web and Mobile Travel Startups in Indonesia)