To kick things off, I’d like to introduce you to the two people who were with me on this journey
Mohammed was the adventurer, who eventually went on to climb Mt Everest and the seven highest summits on each continent
Sachin was the fun-loving explorer who’d be at Times Square for new year’s eve and back in Dubai for new year’s day
They were different, but they shared a love of travel
It was that love of travel which led them to start their first company with …
It’s not the Internet City or Silicon Valley where you’ll find today’s OTAs, but we were bootstrapped and it taught us three things early on …
Our revenue made our today …
And it was in innovation that we realized that our customers were going somewhere else – and it wasn’t the shop next door
It was around this time a little over ten years ago …
In doing so, we joined the likes of Harry Potter, Southwest Airlines, Monsters Inc and several other great ideas that began on a napkin.
Travel before 2008 required a paper ticket
We wanted to challenge convention and we wanted to do it here
This spirit carried over to everyone we worked with – including Amadeus
Amadeus understood us, albeit after several meetings
It may not look like much today, but that’s what the UAE’s first full-service OTA looked like
Today, we’re a company with over 300 people with targeted gross bookings of over
Intelligence is going to ride on top of the automation we’ve built over the last decade and help us do greater things
If you haven’t already automated something, there’s a service out there that has – and you should build on top of it, instead of reinventing the wheel
What’s pushing the demand for this intelligence?
Immediacy
Choice