Tiket2: Comparing Ticket Price, Flight Schedules, and Online Booking Facility

Last year, DailySocial did a review on TiketDomestik.com, provider of ticket price and flight schedule information. The article became one of the most viewed articles (in Indonesian Language), which for me indicates that ticket information service provider is one of necessities, especially among avid flyers.

Another provider with similar service is Tiket2.com. It provide several services for domestic flight information from different cities in Indonesia, facility to compare schedule and price, and booking facility. All in one place.

Users can find flight information from various cities in Indonesia according to their chosen time and departure/arrival city, and arrange will it be a one way or return flight. Two languages are available in Tiket2 website, English and Indonesian Language, will make it easy for users from Indonesia or foreign tourist searching for flight data.

The website have a nice looks, and if you are looking for certain flight schedule, other than getting information of it and airlines you will also get airport information (destination or departure airport) including flight taxes.

Another interesting thing to check is their contact address, located in Jogja. I was curious about this and after contacting Tiket2, turned out that their co-founders are from Poland, Michal Czajkowski and Juliusz Calyniuk. Their website development and technology are also from Poland, while for their Jogja address is the office of PT Grami Setya Mulya, their partner in handling customer relation service and providing ticket booking.

Tiket2’s target market is focused on Indonesia, consist of local users and tourists who want to get domestic flight information, hence the two languages used. They also provide bank transfer payment method which is popular for local users and now, they are developing PayPal and credit card payment method.

Michal also explained other than local market, their primary target, they also pay attention to foreign tourists market. “Foreign tourists market is very important for us, and we will be gradually increasing our exposure to those people in other countries who are willing to come and visit Indonesia.”

As for monetizing strategy, Tiket2 is getting their income from advertisement and booking fee. Michal said that at the moment Tiket2 is still on developing stage. They still use Google AdSense for advertisement income, but on March 2011, Tiket2 will launch advertisement from companies who are interested to advertise on their website.

The most interesting facility from Tiket2 is of course the booking facility, after getting flight schedule information, comparing price from different airlines, users can directly process their ticket reservation, and will get their e-ticket through email.

Other facilities provided to simplify ticket information search are as Michal explained, Tiket2 will keep all users’ search data, which enables Tiket2 to provide interesting information for them, for example the best departure date information based on the most affordable ticket price. Other than that, Tiket2 also aggregates departure information from various cities in one page, to simplify users to choose popular flight schedules.

When asked about technology used to develop Tiket2, Michal said, “Tiket2 is backed up by Symfony, a powerful web application framework (Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks and Dailymotion use it too). With an addition of ORM Doctrine and a non-relational database MongoDB, Symfony speeds up the creation and maintenance of our website.”

When this article is written, looked like Tiket2 was having problems on their ticket reservation facility, but reservations are still accepted through phone reservation.

Some facilities they are developing and will be available are, other than payment facility using credit cards and PayPal, is affiliation system for tour & travel small-mid level companies. Tiket2’s facility will assist on providing professional ticketing service.

Translated by Nita Sellya.