Hotel booking site Wotif is branching into the online flight booking market with the launch of its new sister site, Wotflight.
The announcement comes as the company released its first-half results yesterday, posting a net profit after tax increase of 34% to $27.6 million.
Wotif chief executive Robbie Cook told SmartCompany, the site, which has been in the pipeline for some time, is a good addition to the company’s group which includes LastMinute, AsiaWeb, Trave.com.au and LateStays.com.
“This is something we’re very excited about internally, and we think the way you can search for flights on Wotflight is a great and very simple interface to use. We think it’s something customers will respond to well.”
The company will sweeten the first deals made on the site by offering a $10 voucher for a Wotif booking.
“The good thing about Wotflight, which will act as a sister site, is that it’s able to market itself to the millions of people who come to Wotif every month. We also know that more than 30% of people booking are travelling by plane, so there’s a very qualified audience Wotflight can already tap into.”
While Wotflight is only operating domestically for the time being, Cook says the company has plans to introduce international travel over the next year as the site gets on its feet.
“We’ve just launched the domestic flights to start with, and we’ll move trans-Tasman flights in the current half and then we’ll move internationally in the following six months.”
But it faces some tough competition. Currently Flight Centre and WebJet are two of the most popular online booking tools for airlines and control a good portion of the market.
However, Cook says the company hasn’t paid attention to much of the competition, and instead hopes the simple user interface will bring traffic to its site.
“We haven’t looked directly at the competition that would be in this space. Really we’ve just considered there’s a big qualified audience for booking flights and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
“We think the user interface is different from what other people are doing, and it very clearly shows what your flight times are, the stops, the time you have in stopping over, all very smoothly and geographically. The proof will be in the customer response, but we think it’ll do well.”
Yesterday Wotif announced in its half-year results revenue growth of 19% to $69.7 million, with net profit after tax also increasing 34% to $27.6 million. While the group room rate was down by 4.3%, Cook points out the average length of a booking has grown from 1.92 to 1.96 nights.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
