Zuji to grow B2B in Australia and New Zealand

Peter Smith, well known Aussie travel industry personality has his hands firmly on the helm of Zuji in Australia, but recently The Mole had the opportunity to speak with one of Peter’s regional colleagues Roshan Mendis.

Roshan is based in Singapore and has a cross regional responsibility for the B2B aspects of Zuji’s business in the region in addition to hotels and some business development across the Asia Pacific Region.

As Commercial Director for Zuji, he manages Zuji’s commercial affairs across the region, having enjoyed some considerable success in India and looking after initiatives that cut across the entire region.

Acting rather like a trans regional deal maker, Roshan said it was vital for him to work with the GM in each market to secure their support to push the varying initiatives in each relevant market with each GM being the specialist in that market, optimising the success of the initiative in that country.

He said, “We have not been a prominent player in B2B for the last 5 years but we are now trying to transfer the tremendous success in other parts of the world in B2B to Asia Pacific.”

“We have just started B2B in this region and we will be providing travel, air and hotel content to third party web sites and travel resellers, including for example, and we have been able to get some really good names on board, for example Farifax Digital.”

“We are keen to get this accelerated and we are looking for resellers in this region and also new product, as we brought on Blue Holidays and we need to bring on more new product across Australia for Blue Holidays.” 

Blue Holidays is going exceedingly well and we have just had the best three months and we are also selling Fiji and other Pacific Blue destinations and the length of stay is also pretty good.”

“The type or resellers we are looking for are online or at least on line enabled as our product is on line and will initially be hotel/accommodation focussed so if you look at our partner portfolio in most markets it includes hotels, airline, affinity groups, retired persons associations, etc. 

We are looking to do the same in this region and we have fairly good idea what will perform well in which space.”

“Often clients do not realise that they are booking Zuji, for example on www.jetairways.com bookings are through Zuji and you would not know it and they do many thousands of bookings every week.”

“We need some quick runs on the board and this now gives Peter and me another arm to our product.”  “We have been looking at this as a game of two halves and we now have everything coming together.”

“We are now coming into the second half and have some elements working well including some highly marketed or optimised travel sites and we are now ready with Zuji offerings of varying degrees from a plug and play product called Commission Junction, which is a very easy and immediate way you can have a Zuji link on it and offer a full service of air and hotels.” 

“Then there are various levels and the top game is a full white label operation and then on top of that operations like Blue Holidays.”

This is another revenue stream and avenue for us and we will be growing this part of the business in this market, with the great thing for us being that our office Singapore supports our activity in this space and we also have the number one and most successful on line presence in Singapore.

In summary, the message from Zuji is that we have had tremendous success in the rest of the world and we are now bringing that into Australia and Pacific and Aus is a very important B2B market for us as we move forward.

A TravelMole interview with Roshan Mendis and Peter Smith of Zuji