Indian ecommerce major Flipkart has added a new category to its offerings: Flight bookings. This offering will be powered by online travel aggregator MakeMyTrip, allowing users to book domestic flights through the Flipkart app.
This travel booking feature is currently available exclusively for customers using the Flipkart mobile app on the Android platform.
As far as the customer is concerned, this opens up one more avenue online to book their flights. With this new arrangement on Flipkart, if you already use their app on your mobile, it makes it that much more convenient to make the bookings.
Customers can also look forward to the special offers that the site keeps offering on other product categories. During the Big Shopping Days block of days, which is set to take place from May 13-16, there may be additional offers. The usual cashback offers for using credit cards by some banks could also be availed here.
The flight tickets booking feature has been incorporated within the mobile app and one has to navigate through the drop-down menu and MMT has placed its engine there allowing you to do the bookings and make payments. Your saved payment modes on the main Flipkart site will work here also, making the whole process easy and quick. However, payments via EMI, electronic gift vouchers (EGVs) or PhonePe are not currently enabled.
The travel bookings offering also allows you to do cancellation and receive refunds also within the app itself. Some common features like checking your booked tickets details in the ‘your orders’ section have been incorporated too.
This could be a part of Flipkart’s strategy of being a large group company with a diverse range of offerings on its platform.
This also comes at a time when Walmart acquired a majority stake in Flipkart for nearly $16 billion last week. The deal saw co-founder Sachin Bansal exit the company, along with its investor Naspers. SoftBank, however, is said to be evaluating its exit.