Metasearch has irreversibly altered the way in which people book travel. It has been gathering momentum considerably over the last few years, and its rapid growth shows no sign of slowing down. Put simply, consumers want freedom of choice and transparency, in the simplest and most concise format possible as the information available continues to grow exponentially. While globally there are a few players in the travel metasearch engine domain, the Indian picture is different. There are hardly Indian companies which cater to the need of Indian customers and understand the necessities of Indians. Kerala-based FareFirst wanted to partner with existing aggregators initially and prove the potential of this startup with numbers. Within a year of its journey, it has reached 900K+ downloads in the android platform and serves 110K+ users monthly. "Our next step is to gain the interest of more OTAs and airlines and list all of them on our platform. This is mutually beneficial as we'll be selling tickets on their behalf on our platform," says Yajnesh T - Co-Founder & CEO.

FareFirst is a platform where both well-known and lesser-known OTAs and airlines to showcase and sell their tickets. It's a one-stop destination for customers to search, compare and book flight tickets intuitively and painlessly. Platforms like FareFirst help showcase new services and new startups

with equal merit compared with established brands and this creates a fair business model. The company has saved a lot of time and money for travellers across the globe by intelligently comparing and optimizing the flight search results. "We as a travel metasearch engine, provide a uniform experience to the user while including most of the OTA and airline results in our platform. The customer needs to search in only in our platform to view the results from 200+ OTAs and 1000+ airlines around the globe we have partnered with. As a result, within the launch of one year, we have gained the interest of 110K unique users/month across the globe with around 400K flight searches happening every month," he explicates.

The aim of farefirst is to popularize the concept of travel metasearch engine

Standing out in the Crowd
The aim of FareFirst is to popularize the concept of travel metasearch engine. For this, it has partnered with aggregators specific to India where preference is given to local search results. With its new features like NOMAD, it helps travelers around the globe plan and customizes their trips on-the-go leveraging its state of the art AI-based algorithm. "If you check the Nomad section of our app, you can input any cities of your choice and plan a trip. Our friends have created trips for 10 cities covering entire India costing only 22000 for flights. These kinds of innovation will encourage people to travel more without spending a bomb, all thanks to the power of metasearch engine and intelligent route calculation algorithm," he mentions.

“Platforms like farefirst help showcase new services and new startups with equal merit compared with established brands and this creates a fair business model”

To draw uniqueness, the company has chalked out new ways of marketing its product in innovative ways. Some of its methods have given good results. It is further exploring the digital marketing opportunities with the in-house team. "We are confident that with enough investment we'll be able to crack this," he adds.

What's Next!
In a nutshell, there's nothing stopping FareFirst from reaching greater heights in the coming years. The team will bring in more unique and fresh features. "We are investing in a specialized multi-city search, where the algorithm suggests the optimal route and staying length with price sensitivity based on the non-rigid search parameters entered by the user," he concludes.