To be successful, an online business must be addressed seriously even though it was started from hobbies, not merely something on the side or something casual. This is what we can learn from Ezy Travel. Prior to becoming a successful business the way it is today, Ezy Travel failed because it wasn’t paid enough attention.
Ezy Travel itself was originally established in 2008 which began as a hobby for its founder who had been in the travel industry for quite some time. Eric Tjetjep Wai Kin, Ezy Travel’s founder, had been managing his family’s 47 year old travel business, Dwidaya Tour. Ezy Travel was conceived initially as the online arm of Dwidaya to expand the business and capture new customers.
When DailySocial visited Ezy Travel’s office recently, Eric told us that when Ezy Travel was established in 2008, he did not take it seriously. As a result, Ezy Travel was forced to go out of business in 2009. It wasn’t until 2011 that Eric made a second attempt to launch the business with a lot of changes and fixes. This time, he decided to take it seriously and it managed to do well.
What is Ezy Travel exactly? Well, you can say that Ezy Travel is an integrated destination for travelers as this site not only offers flight ticketing services but also hotel and tour package reservations and it is a service that puts forward practicality and customer satisfaction.
Doddy Lukito, CTO of Ezy Travel, said, “we are different from other similar services in the sense that we have already had the contents of our services even before we went online. We provide all tourism services in one website. In fact, we are going to launch our new services, which are cruise and travel insurance services.”
Now, Ezy Travel is currently preparing a mobile application which will be launched at the end of this year. “Our website is responsive already, so we intend to put even more values to our upcoming mobile application. We want to provide not only booking services, but also information about tourism sites as well as departure reminder. So, it’s not only used to book, but there are also additional values for the customers” Doddy added.
24 hour-Call Center
When we had a chat with Eric and Doddy, they told us a fact, which is, Indonesian customers tend to call even though they have booked the services online already. “There are many orders via phone, they usually browse our services and call us afterwards,” Doddy said.
Therefore, to accommodate the condition, Ezy Travel focuses on building top quality call center that is able to handle those orders.
The call center itself is now available for 24 hours, and divided into three shifts. “We invested a lot in the call center service, we even require the officers to build relationship with the customers. As a result, 30 percent of our customers always return to us over and over again.” Doddy said. “They (call center officers) are there to serve the customers,” Eric added. The call center officers in fact become the first one to attract loyal customers.
Payment Ease
Besides offering top quality call center service, Ezy Travel also offers easy payment. To complete the payment, customers may choose one of several methods, ranging from credit cards, bank transfer, to Indomaret. “Not only hotel booking, to pay for a tour customers may also pay at Indomaret,” Eric said.
According to Eric, at the moment personal ticket indeed still dominates the total transaction, but tour packages gives the company more profit. “There is more than one ticket for a tour package.”
He also added that the transaction may increase up to 300 percent in the upcoming school holiday and Idul Fitri. In this regard, domestic holiday still be people’s favorite and the destination might vary, depends on the trends. “When going to Raja Ampat becomes a trend, then there will be a lot of people choosing it as their destination.”
Ezy market itself serves all areas of Indonesia, but most of the orders still come from Jakarta. “In low season, the total transaction may reach IDR 1 billion,” Eric added. Furthermore, he also said that Ezy Travel always breaks new records of transaction each and every month since the services were launched in last February.
Online Travelling Business and Its Potential
According to Ezy Travel’s data, Doddy said, there are 600 thousands of tourists in Indonesia in a day. That is a huge market. There are a lot of companies start to target this market, from online ticketing services, hotel booking, to tour packages offerings. However, even though the competition is tough, Eric remains optimistic because he believes that the market is huge.
The strategy that Ezy Travel is applying now is to strengthen their internal divisions, such as operation division, technology division, and marketing division. Once they feel that it is strong enough, they will start to expand their business by targeting more segmented markets.
“We offer one stop shopping services now, but we also have the plan to establish several websites which offer specialized shopping services,” Doddy said. He then added by saying that there are many concepts of traveling business, so there are a lot to develop. “We are preparing many concepts. Just you wait” he added.
[Photo Illustration: Shuttershock]
[translation by Rifki Aria Nugraha]
