Jizo.ru expands offering to become full service online tourism provider
Fast Lane Ventures’ online travel portal, Jizo.ru, has significantly expanded its package of services to help make the travel organization more efficient and convenient.
In addition to Jizo.ru’s core service offering – providing an online search tool for the cheap airline tickets – the website now offers users the ability to search for railway tickets, charter flights, hotel reservations and car rentals. For the moment the total volume of investments in the project amounts to $2 million.
Since the project start-up three months ago, the number of users has grown to 25,000 visitors per day, making it a prominent player in the market for online touristic services in a short period of time.
Jizo.ru General Director, Sergei Lavrentyev, said Jizo.ru was well-positioned to continue to capitalize on the growing consumer shift to online touristic services in Russia
“Today the rhythm of life is such that more and more people prefer resources where they can receive all information they are interested in at once and Jizo.ru offers exactly that solution,” he said.
“We save time and money of our visitors, assisting them in organizing of their travel from beginning to end, staying within the one portal and providing the most attractive prices.”
Information on the flight costs and timetables is collated from a dozen of Russia’s largest online tourist agencies, a number of direct accesses to airlines and 25 low cost airlines which allows Jizo.ru to offer to its clients a wide range of flight options and compare them on a price and convenience basis.
The Jizo.ru search portal was recently expanded to include well-known European low cost airlines including Ryanair, and Easyjet.
While 90% of requests are currently relate to commercial airline tickets, the portal has been further upgraded to perform searches for charter flights and also railway tickets throughout Russia.
Jizo.ru’s expanded suite now also includes a service for hotel search and reservations from 30 of the world’s largest hotel search providers, including well-known brands Expedia.com, Booking.com and HRS.com.
Users are able to research and compare pricing on more than 225,000 hotels using different search criteria as well as make a reservation and pay for the accommodation online through several international reservation services.
The other key development on Jizo has been the introduction of a rental car search service through cooperation with more than 550 international rental companies including Budget, Enterprise, Europcar, National, Thrifty, Payless and Alamo. The Jizo.ru search tool offers car rental choices across 175 countries and in 25,000 cities.
“Modern travellers are actively migrating to online touristic services. According to a recent survey* from Google and Citibank, online-reservation and online-sale of touristic services is the fastest growing sector of the touristic market,” Mr Lavrentyev said.
“In Russia, the standard of online services is not yet equal to the rest of the world but the signals of fast growth are already obvious and with these new developments to the portal, Jizo is ideally placed be a major player in the Russian market.”
The financial model of Jizo is based on the CPA/CPC principle wh ereby the Jizo.ru portal receives a commission for forwarding the user to the site of the provider and for ultimately making a purchase.
Jizo is the new touristic meta-search engine, providing users with optimal choice of airline and railway tickets as well as reservation services for hotels and cars all over the world.
*According to joint research by Citibank and Google, airline tickets are at the head of the list of the most popular search categories and out of 600 billion rubles spent by Russians online in 2010, 34.8% was accounted for by airline tickets (1st place) and 12.9% by railway tickets (2nd place)(source: “What Russian buy on the Internet” of November 2, 2010).