Sabeer Bhatia relaunches Arzoo.com

Mumbai, Oct 5: Sabeer Bhatia, the co-founder of Hotmail, today relaunched Arzoo.com as an online one-stop travel shop with a vision ''to be preferred travel partner'' here today.

Mr Bhatia had founded Hotmail in partnership with Jack Smith in 1996 and sold it to Microsoft later, where he had worked for a year before launching Arzoo.com.

''Some of the services that would be offered to our customers after its relaunch include booking of domestic and international flights and vacation packages and others,'' said Mr Bhatia while briefing the mediapersons here today.

''Besides, finding weekend gateways and service apartments are the two distinctive features that make our services different from others,'' he claimed.

The new products to be launched by the company in near future include US-to-India and UK-to-India operations to serve customers in those countries.

''Online travel in India is expected to grow 10-fold over the next five years and we believe that this represents a great opportunity for us and hence the relaunch of Arzoo.com,'' he said.

''The unique value proposition of Arzoo.com is that customers have a choice of multiple ways of making travel reservations. The customers have got various options to choose from. They may either make travel arrangements by visiting Arzoo's website or they can do the same by simply sending an SMS to the company. Also, the customers can contact our call centre for getting their travel-related queries answered well,'' said Amalendu Purandare, General Manager (operations and business development) of the company.

The company with its international headquarters in California, has employed 70 personnel in its call centre opened for the purpose in Mumbai.

''So far, we've got lined up of 700 hotels across the world for our customers and the negotiated rates of those hotels are much lower than the prevailing rates,'' he claimed.

Replying to a media query, Mr Bhatia said, ''The internet accessibility of the Indians was still low.'' However, he hoped that it had a tremendous potential to grow in future.

''Now we are planning to launch our services for getting customers air tickets booked through mobile phone soon,'' he added.

UNI