Yatra’s First International Expansion Looks Nothing Like Its OTA Competitors

India’s Yatra Online on Monday announced what it describes as its “first significant international expansion,” by partnering with Bahrain-based Kanoo Travel to power corporate travel management in the region.

Under the partnership, Yatra will license its corporate travel platform to Kanoo Travel, the travel management arm of the Kanoo Group.

“The commercial model is built around software-as-a-service,” CEO Siddhartha Gupta told Skift.

Beyond supplying the technology, Yatra is establishing a global operations center in India that will provide round-the-clock multilingual support for Kanoo’s corporate customers, effectively operating the back-office customer service functions from India while serving businesses across the Gulf.

In a stock exchange filing Yatra mentioned the term of the agreement is for seven years.

The structure allows Yatra to expand internationally without the cost and uncertainty of building a customer ba