Travel Booking Bangladesh Ltd, the Dhaka-based online travel agency, has rebranded and relaunched its brand and service portfolio under the new name ShareTrip Limited. The company announced the rebranding in a launch event on Tuesday, July 30th that took place at Radisson Blu Dhaka Water Garden in the capital. It has also launched ShareTrip android and iOS app.
ShareTrip is an online travel aggregator that offers airline tickets to hotel bookings, holiday packages around the world, estimated cost listings, and managing appropriate transports for traveling.
Founded as Travel Booking BD, the startup was predominantly focused on offline travel market with a decent focus on online in the early days. With excellent customer service, it grew quickly. Over the past years, it has slowly been growing its investment in OTA business. The company raised an investment early this year.
With the relaunch, ShareTrip aims to focus on growing its OTA business, launch new services, and eyes expansion both vertically and geographically.
The company has launched a new android and iOS app with interesting features such as Trip Coins. User can play ‘Spin to Win’, and earn Trip Coins, a kind of travel reward points. Trip Coins can also be earned booking something from ShareTrip app, or by sharing the booking. Trip Coins can later be deemed to get savings on flight, hotel, holiday booking and more. ShareTrip is the first travel app to introduce reward-driven gamification in Bangladesh.
TBBD was founded as a side project in 2014 while TBBD founder Kashef Rahman was working at Banglalink. Soon after launching TBBD, he left Banglalink to give TBBD full-time because TBBD was growing rapidly and managing it on the side was not feasible. The rest is an incredible story of growth. With the rebranding and renewed focus on online travel products and services, the company now begins a new phase of its journey.
The timing for paying serious attention to OTA business could not have been better than this. The growing travel market in Bangladesh is the testament of that timing. Travel is a $7 trillion dollar industry globally.
In Bangladesh, travel has been seeing steady growth over the past couple of years, an increasing number of Bangladeshis are now traveling overseas (formal outbound travel expenses was $436.4 million in FY16) and the industry is just getting started, in every meaning of the word. Domestic travel has been seeing phenomenal growth over the past few years. Outbound travel has also grown meaningfully. Put that together with OTA, the future of OTA business can only go one direction and that’s exponential growth.
Given all these indicators, this is the perfect timing for putting your bet on OTA in the context of Bangladesh.
That being said, whether going full-throttle into OTA warrant a rebranding remains a question because TBBD already had a well-established brand image in the market, which the company will have to invest both time and money to build with ShareTrip.
Over the past years, we’ve covered TBBD extensively. Find some of our most interesting TBBD stories below.
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