Online travel portal, Ezeego1.com has forayed into the offline segment by setting up its first ever franchisee store in Surat, Gujarat. This store will provide travel related services like bookings of flight tickets, hotel accommodation, car rentals, holiday packages, rail, cruise, bus, sightseeing, visa and Insurance to customers who are still not Internet savvy and prefer booking tickets from a retail outlet. With this franchisee store, Ezeego1.com intends to establish its offline presence and distribution network across all cities in India, thereby following a hybrid offline+online sales model similar to Via.com and Yatra.com. Whats interesting though is that Ezeego1.com has started with a tier II city (Surat) and it intends to focus on tier II and tier III cities in this fiscal year. It would be interesting to see how much of the offline retail efforts contribute to the company's overall sales. Ezeego1.com added that it will also provide an on-going marketing, technical and store development support to the franchisee. This includes preferential print and radio ad commercials, help in store designing to reflect the brand look and feel and training and technical support to the franchisee. Launched in 2006, Ezeego1.com is a travel portal which offers a travel related marketplace where various suppliers, travel agents, and travel partners distribute, promote and sell their travel products including Flights, Hotels, Holidays, Bus & Train Tickets, Car Rentals, Cruises, Visa & Forex services to online customers. In November 2011, Ezeego1.com had collaborated with SREI Sahaj e-Village to set up broadband enabled Common Service Centres in rural India to offer air tickets, holiday packages, hotel bookings and other…
