Recognition for consumer empowerment in e-business & commerce category

New Delhi, India -- (SBWire) -- 01/03/2010 -- iXiGO.com (http://www.ixigo.com), India’s fastest-growing travel search site has been named a finalist at the prestigious Manthan Awards South Asia 2009, organized by the Digital Empowerment Foundation in partnership with World Summit Award and American India Foundation (http://www.manthanaward.org/section_full_story.asp?id=880).

The Manthan Awards recognize innovative South Asian projects that promote development through digital inclusion and empower communities through knowledge-sharing. iXiGO.com, India's largest travel search engine, has been selected as a finalist in the e-business & commerce category, owing to its innovative business model and transparent approach to online travel information search & aggregation.

iXiGO.com's strength has been its unbiased travel meta-search model that compares travel inventory across multiple travel websites, allowing consumers to make more informed choices for making their air, hotel, bus, train bookings online. By showing travelers an all-inclusive price comparison without commercial bias and by searching across even the smaller travel booking websites in the region, iXiGO.com helps save time and money for its users and is a completely free of cost service. Unlike other travel sites, iXiGO.com is not a transactional booking site. Users search travel options on iXiGO.com and to purchase them Select and Click on the Travel Supplier link available for the chosen price. iXiGO.com, then redirects users to a deep-link page on the chosen Travel Supplier's booking site for transaction, thereby reducing time, effort and other intermediaries in the booking process. Such has been the resulting empowerment for consumers, that iXiGO.com has grown purely by word of mouth to over 1.5 million searches a month and its user-base has tripled during 2009.

Speaking on the occasion, Aloke Bajpai, Founder-CEO of iXiGO.com said - "We feel honoured by our selection as a finalist to this unique South Asian award. It feels good to know that our innovation is touching the lives of travelers across the region by offering them trustworthy information for decision-making related to their trips."

iXiGO.com has been a pioneer of several innovations in the Indian online travel industry including air fare alerts, air fare outlook graphs, a user-friendly trains search engine, the world's largest hotel search engine, and complex searches over multiple hops on regional/international low cost carriers etc. iXiGO.com has recently been voted as "India's Most Trusted Travel Site" by a user-poll conducted by pluggd.in in 2009.

About iXiGO.com:
iXiGO.com is South Asia’s leading online & mobile travel search engine based out of Gurgaon, India. iXiGO.com searches across multiple airlines, hotels, trains and bus booking sites to find the best travel deals. Launched in June 2007 by IIT, INSEAD and Amadeus alumni Aloke Bajpai, Rajnish Kumar and Dharmendra Yashovardhan, iXiGO.com has been recognized by NASSCOM as India’s Top-100 Innovator. BusinessToday and Wall Street Journal/Mint have named it among India’s 10 hottest startups in 2008 for its unique market approach, product usability, and passionate management team.

iXiGO is backed by BAF Spectrum, a Singapore-based seed-investment fund. For more information about iXiGO, visit www.ixigo.com or m.ixigo.com (mobile).

Contact

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Media Contact
Dharmendra Yashovardhan
dharmendra@ixigo.com
+91 124 4045281