Travel search engine iXiGO integrates Google Street View to its platform & more

Travel search engine iXiGO, owned and operated by Delhi-based Le Travenues Technology Pvt Ltd, has revamped its trip planner product with a slew of features, including Google Street View, location-based search and user-generated ratings & reviews.

The Google Street View feature offers 360-degree views of key monuments and historical places in India, which the company claims will help travellers in planning their trips better in advance. Its location-based feature on the mobile app—which is called Near Me—helps people spot great local places to eat, stay or explore. Users can also add hotels, restaurants, interesting places to visit, and photos to the portal. iXiGO claims it has listed over 65,000 restaurants in the country across its website and apps.

The user-generated ratings & reviews feature allows users to rate and review a place they visited on the website or on the company's Android and iOS apps. Users can also rate and review trains, platforms and other facilities while on the go. According to the company, it already offers over 1.75 lakh reviews and over 23,000 ratings of places. These ratings and reviews are then used to rank places better in iXiGO's search results.

"Travellers have become more independent than ever; a recent survey we conducted among frequent travellers revealed that 67 per cent like to plan their trip themselves. With our focus on mobile, semantic search, depth of content, user-generated photos and ratings and reviews, we are looking to become the brand of choice for Indian travellers looking for smarter travel research and planning tools," said Rajnish Kumar, CTO, iXiGO.

Founded by INSEAD and Amadeus alumni Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai (CEO) in 2007, iXiGO searches, aggregates and curates travel content across hundreds of travel sites, allowing travellers to access relevant travel information. In 2011, it had raised $18.5 million in funding from SAIF Partners and NASDAQ-listed OTA MakeMyTrip. The firm claims that it has over 2.5 million active users every month and has seen almost 2.5 million app downloads across its apps. In its segment, the company mainly competes with Wego India and HolidayIQ, among others.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)