Yatra.com, among India's largest online travel portals, has acquired events listing site BuzzInTown, according to a report in the IndiaDigitalReview; the development has been confirmed to the publication by BuzzInTown co-Founder & CEO Amitabh Saran. The companies have a common investor in Intel Capital. A question which might come to mind is - why would Yatra, a leading player in the travel space acquire BuzzInTown? Our sense is that the travel ticketing space is commoditized - and has been so for quite a while now - and online travel agents are now looking to diversify in the e-commerce and event ticketing space. Ticketing is ticketing, and BuzzInTown is one of the few sources for tickets for events like plays and concerts, apart from BookMyShow, TicketPro and a few others. Also keep in mind that Yatra has a common investor with BookMyShow as well - the Network18 Group. There is unlikely to be synergy in the front end - while travelers going to a particular city might want to know about what to do in case they have free time, it isn't really top-of-mind when they're booking airline or train tickets: a cross-sell of event tickets to travelers isn't likely to be a large market, though it is worth a shot. At the back end, both businesses are about aggregating fragmented markets: Yatra has so far been dealing with airline tickets (not very fragmented) and hotels (fragmented), while the likes of BuzzInTown and (mostly) BookMyShow, which was the first in the event ticketing…
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