Skift Take
Millennials? Not an overriding concern for Russia's Travel.ru, which is taking advantage of a boom in domestic travel, gives customers a variety of payment options, including pre-paying for hotels in cash at kiosks, and is navigating the shift from offline to online and mobile.
Editor’s Note: Skift is publishing a series of interviews with online travel CEOs talking about the Future of Travel Booking, and the evolving habits and device preferences of travel consumers. Check out all the interviews as they come out here.
As CEO, Marina Kolesnik has choreographed the evolution of a leading Russian online travel agency, Travel.ru, through a transformative period which has seen a rapid shift from offline to online and mobile, and a dramatic upswing in independent and domestic travel in 2014 following the collapse of major tour operators, the devaluation of the ruble, and political strife, which has seen the U.S. and Europe impose economic sanctions against Russia.
Taking the helm of online hotel booking site Oktogo.ru in 2010, Kolesnik led the acquisition of content portal Travel.ru in 2013, and views it as a way to answer travelers' needs throughout the travel cycle, from research to booking to post-trip reviews.
As part of its CEO interview series on the future of travel booking, Skift discussed with Kolesnik the specific trends under way in the Russian market, including the advantages accruing to local players because of the increasing importance of domestic travel; the relative lack of importance of any Millennial trend within Russia; the possibility that the Russian government might impose restrictions on international players in travel, and what it's like to be a woman CEO in the male-dominated global C-suite of online travel.
An edited portion of the interview follows:
Skift: Oktogo acquired travel information and review site Travel.ru in 2013. Can you explain your multi-brand strategy, the role of reviews and destination information, and the implications it all has for the fuure of travel booking?
Marina Kolesnik: Let me take one step back and tell you why we acquired Travel.ru. I've always felt that research, shopping and then booking takes quite a bit of time. It can be time-consuming. There are great content sites, they give ideas, but they generally don't make a very smooth transition as to where do you book your experience that you just enjoyed reading about. There are issues around mapping the data and how do you get to the desired destination.
So that all takes additional research. We have seen that metasearch has mastered the shopping component, but very often they are handing off the customer elsewhere, especially when we are talking about a market that is not as mature as the U.S. Handing
