Competitors of Yatra made hay as the online travel company scrambled to fix its website, which was inaccessible to customers from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening.
NEW DELHI: Competitors of Yatra made hay as the online travel company scrambled to fix its website, which was inaccessible to customers from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening.
On Monday, Goibibo.com began wooing customers with the message: "Book your Yatra tickets." A senior executive of another travel website said his company has experienced an uptick in transactions since Sunday. "Actually, transactions in all of Yatra's competitors have risen as a result of customers switching over," said the executive who spoke on the condition that neither his company nor his name be revealed.
Yatra executives told ET at 7.15 pm that the website is "accessible to all desktop users worldwide at the present moment". Yatra, India's second-largest online travel company by market share at 30% after Makemytrip, records around 6,000 transactions a day.
Customers who visited the Yatra website on Sunday and for the most part of Monday were directed to a website (a domain parking webpage) that said "the domain has expired". That fuelled speculation in the social media that the company executives forgot to renew the domain name.
Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO of Yatra, said the company is investigating whether the domain name really expired. "Though the expiry of the domain name could be technically true, we are still trying to assess the root cause of the problem."
Companies buy website addresses, also known as domain names, from domain registrars such as goddaddy.com and bigrock.in, which send several reminders before the addresses expire. Yatra has registered its web address with a company called Network Solutions for five years.
Shringi agreed that the domain lapsed on Sunday, but said there is usually a "grace period" of 30 days before it fully expires. "If it (the website address) indeed expired fully, it would have hit the open market for someone else to buy," he said.
He said the delay in the accessibility of the website to all users was because it takes internet service providers (ISPs) up to 48 hours to reconfigure domain name systems once a website goes offline. "Even so, we worked actively with all our ISP partners to ensure access issues were resolved quickly. We also send text messages to customers and shared our helpline number across social media channels,' he said.
On Monday, Goibibo.com began wooing customers with the message: "Book your Yatra tickets." A senior executive of another travel website said his company has experienced an uptick in transactions since Sunday. "Actually, transactions in all of Yatra's competitors have risen as a result of customers switching over," said the executive who spoke on the condition that neither his company nor his name be revealed.
Yatra executives told ET at 7.15 pm that the website is "accessible to all desktop users worldwide at the present moment". Yatra, India's second-largest online travel company by market share at 30% after Makemytrip, records around 6,000 transactions a day.
Customers who visited the Yatra website on Sunday and for the most part of Monday were directed to a website (a domain parking webpage) that said "the domain has expired". That fuelled speculation in the social media that the company executives forgot to renew the domain name.
Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO of Yatra, said the company is investigating whether the domain name really expired. "Though the expiry of the domain name could be technically true, we are still trying to assess the root cause of the problem."
Companies buy website addresses, also known as domain names, from domain registrars such as goddaddy.com and bigrock.in, which send several reminders before the addresses expire. Yatra has registered its web address with a company called Network Solutions for five years.
Shringi agreed that the domain lapsed on Sunday, but said there is usually a "grace period" of 30 days before it fully expires. "If it (the website address) indeed expired fully, it would have hit the open market for someone else to buy," he said.
He said the delay in the accessibility of the website to all users was because it takes internet service providers (ISPs) up to 48 hours to reconfigure domain name systems once a website goes offline. "Even so, we worked actively with all our ISP partners to ensure access issues were resolved quickly. We also send text messages to customers and shared our helpline number across social media channels,' he said.
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