Ecommerce giant Amazon’s plans to convert itself into a broad-based enterprise received a boost with it entering the travel segment. You can now book air tickets for domestic travel on the Amazon website thanks to a tie-up the ecommerce site has concluded with Cleartrip.com. As you would have expected, Amazon is offering some incentives like cashbacks to attract customers. As an additional benefit, there are concessions on the ticket cancellation fees as well.
An offer window has been opened with cashback offers to both the Amazon Prime and non-Prime customers. For the Amazon Prime customers, the cashback starts at Rs 800 and can go up to Rs 2,000 based on the value of the transactions on ticket booking. For those not subscribed to Amazon’s loyalty programme, the cashback offers start at Rs 400 and go up to Rs 1,600. On the cancellation charges, Amazon claims they won’t add anything over what the airlines impose as ticket cancellation fees. Most online ticketing sites add their own charges while cancelling tickets.
Amazon already has a video streaming service called Amazon Prime Video. Besides, the Amazon Pay channel offers services like making payments for utility bills, mobile phone recharges etc. Booking domestic air tickets gets added to this portfolio.
The acquisition of Tapzo by Amazon was bound to result in additional services being offered on the Amazon app converting it into a Super App, which appears to be the company’s objective too.
Though the anchor business could be online shopping, adding all these services attract customers to their app or website more often and that can add to those visiting the shopping pages and buying something. This was the plan while introducing the Prime Video service as well. In a plain vanilla shopping platform, customers may log in once in a fortnight. You don’t do shopping everyday online. But the Prime customers would log in every day to watch their favourite programme and can move to the shopping pages. The same can happen with practically every other service Amazon adds to its platform, going ahead.