Have you been thinking about that long due trip but don’t know where to start from? Already have a destination in mind but feel that the local travel agent is charging too much? What if you could just do it all by yourself? At least that’s the offering of SastaTicket.pk, a one-stop shop for your travel bookings.

It’s an online travel agency, based out of Karachi, that not only lets you find the cheapest hotels and flights but also make booking right there on the website.

To be clear, the startup caters to people traveling within or to/out of Pakistan. So if you want to fly from Karachi to Milan, they have you covered. But if you are looking to take a flight from Prague to Paris, that’s not their area.

The way it works is pretty simple: go to their website, choose a category (hotel or flight), enter your destination, pick the dates and the number of people, and bam! It will show you a list of all available options in ascending order of price. Then you can just make the payment as per your preferred option and you are good to go.

SastaTicket has both domestic and international offerings, displaying 500+ hotels from across the country and 100,000 from around the world. As for airlines, they have all the players operating in or out of Pakistan. They also have pretty much all the big payment channels integrated on their system, from bank cards to branchless/mobile banking options.

The flight tickets are updated live, displaying inventory of the airlines in real time. But for the hotels, it depends on the vendor. “Some of the big chains have the necessary systems in place so we have real-time updates but that’s not possible with the smaller players since they often lack even a basic tech infrastructure. These guys then manually put their inventory details on the website through their vendor account and communicate to us their availability (or the lack of it),” says SastaTicket CEO Shazil Mekhri.

The startup was launched in September 2016 by Mekhri brothers – Shazil and Bilal – who had been handling their family business, a well-established travel agency for corporates. “We were already in this line and knew the potential gains of going online but weren’t sure. However, after the Daraz wave, we took the leap forward,” Shazil recalls.

SastaTicket’s presence across geographies makes it prone to competition from all across. Domestically, the travel agents, who up till now had enjoyed a monopoly, are still well in the game. “There are around 4,000 registered travel agents in Pakistan and they all have their own niches and geographies, with some focusing on corporates, others on Hajj, Umrah, etc. But our edge is that we bring it all on a single portal,” says Shazil.

Meanwhile, the two global giants in the industry — Booking.com and Expedia – are also already operational in Pakistan so how does Shazil hope to mark his turf? “As for their international offerings, they obviously have a much wider network, but we understand the local scene better and can address the distribution challenges more efficiently,” he claims.

The Airbnb threat to hotel industry itself, however, has hardly materialised in Pakistan despite the company’s presence but no one say if it will stay that way.

But even without these rivals, the startup has quite a few challenges of its own. The absence of any standardisation body and in many cases, even the tech infrastructure itself, makes the integration process very complex. “Airlines and the big hotel chains have their own application programme interface, then there are the hotels that update their inventory on our app, so it becomes a very messy process, only to get bigger as we grow,” says Shazil.

Like most others in the business, SastaTicket also generates revenue by charging a certain commission to its supplier on every sale generated through their portal.

The startup was self funded for the first two years, but just the beginning of this month, they closed series A at $1.5m with Gobi VC – a South Asian giant venture capital. “We were looking for an investor who has experience in the travel industry and Gobi had launched its new fund for Muslim countries, so it was the right match,” says Shazil. He expects the investment to burn out in around 18 months and will be using it for tech upgrade as well as scaling further.

One thing, however, isn’t clear: in a country where airlines are beyond the reach of masses, why has SastaTicket not gone for the more accessible modes of transportation. “We had Pakistan Railways for a while but it didn’t last long. But now we are in talks again to bring them on board and will eventually be moving to get the bus services onto our system as well,” Shazil says.

The writer is member of staff:
m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com
Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, November 25th, 2018