OZON.travel

2022: Launch of the hotel booking aggregator

In mid-April 2022, Ozon announced the launch of its own hotel booking aggregator. The service, earned on the basis of the platform, offers 70 thousand options for living in Russia and other states available for visiting. Users will be able to pay up to 99% of the reservation price with Ozon points.

Ozon Travel offers are collected from online booking sites; in the future, a marketplace will be created for hotels, where a special personal account will be available to hotels, to which they can connect directly and lay out their offers, manage prices themselves, Ozon notes.

In mid-April 2022, Ozon announced the launch of its own hotel booking aggregator.

More than 3.5 million customers use the Ozon Travel service every month, we see high demand for air and railway tickets. Now we also have hotels. The appearance of a marketplace for hotels, which we will launch in the near future, will give hotel market players even more opportunities to reach a new audience for them - commented on the launch of the online hotel booking aggregator, Ozon Travel CEO Mikhail Osin.

According to him, in the first days of testing the service on a limited sample of users, about 100 bookings were already made daily. Osin added that the appearance of a marketplace for hotels, the launch of which was planned by Ozon, will give hotel market players even more opportunities to reach a new audience for them.

The service is available on the site and in the Ozon application: you need to select the top menu of Ozon Travel and further "Hotels."

Ozon announced the launch of its own hotel booking aggregator about a month after major foreign housing search services Booking.com and Airbnb announced the suspension of their activities in Russia.^[1]

2021: Integration with Ozon

In early June 2021, it became known about the closure of Ozon Travel as a separate service. It is integrated with the main Ozon marketplace, which, as noted in the company, will allow to abandon the mark-up on airline tickets due to access to a wider audience (every month more than 80 million people visit the Ozon online hypermarket).

As Kommersant was told in Ozon, although the Ozon Travel site will cease to exist as a separate site, the legal entity of the Internet Travel service will remain. Data on purchased tickets will appear in a special section in the personal account of the buyer Ozon.

Ozon closed a separate online travel agency and built it into the main marketplace

The agency service will also be preserved, in which the user has access to flight options, assistance and support when booking "in one window" - for example, on issues of exchange or return of tickets. Ozon Travel will continue to earn on additional services: priority processing of requests, making changes to reservations, etc.

Ozon noted that markup is usually used by market players to promote and attract new customers. Ozon Travel, abandoning the mark-up on airline tickets and maintaining the previous cost of additional services, will be able to offer its customers prices at the carrier tariff level and at the same time a high level of service.

Integration with Ozon for us is a logical and long-awaited step that will make a qualitative breakthrough in product convenience and service economics, "says Mikhail Osin, CEO of Ozon Travel. - The multimillion-dollar loyal audience of Ozon will save Ozon Travel from advertising costs, and the refusal to mark-up on airline tickets will make our offer unique - we will be able to offer users the best prices for flights. Ozon will expand its range - users will be able not only to purchase a variety of goods, including for trips, but also to book a trip - and all this on the same site.[2]

2018: OZON.travel doubles IT staff

The service for the sale of aircraft and railway tickets plans to focus on the development of a highly competitive product with a focus on the technological platform.

In the near future, the company plans to hire more than 50 specialists in the field of software engineering, product management and system administration.

The service plans to build a fundamentally new technological platform that ensures the rapid development of the product and the implementation of new approaches to solving the problems of the travel industry, including the use of artificial intelligence elements and natural language recognition (NLP) technologies.

The company has vacancies for developers, testers, system administrators, DevOps engineers, project managers and product managers. The company believes that one of the advantages of working in OZON.travel is the ability to gain experience in the practical use of technologies and software products such as kubernetes, helm, linkerd, coredns, bgp/calico, prometheus, etcd and couchbase.

"We have quite ambitious tasks ahead of us. There is a lot of work, so we need strong specialists who are not afraid of serious challenges. OZON.travel together with OZON.ru, it is being transformed into a high-tech service with great opportunities for implementing planned projects, "says Yuri Vasiyarov, technical director of the OZON.travel.

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