Online travel booking means the websites and apps where you search for a trip and pay for it: flights, hotels, trains, buses and holidays. Indian travel sites sell all of these in one app, because many Indian trips combine a train or a bus with a flight.
These sites rarely own what they sell. A seat on a flight belongs to the airline, and a berth on a sleeper bus belongs to the bus operator. The site shows the seat, takes your payment and passes the booking to the owner. In return, it earns a commission on each booking. This way of selling is explained in marketplace vs inventory model.
Four products make up this zone. The online travel agency (OTA) is the app most people know. It searches flights, hotels and holidays. Online bus ticketing sells seats on thousands of private buses, with a seat map and a choice of boarding point. Train booking and waitlist prediction sells Indian Railways tickets and estimates whether a waitlisted ticket will be confirmed. The B2B travel portal is the site where neighbourhood travel agents book for their own customers.
Here is a typical case. A college student in Bhopal wants to go home to Patna for Chhath. On one app, she compares a train, an overnight bus and a flight with a change in Delhi. The train shows waitlist 31, with a 40% chance of confirmation. The flight costs ₹9,800. She books the bus.
Two problems are shared by every product here. First, the seat she sees is also on sale on other sites at the same moment. So it must disappear from every site the moment someone books it. Second, the price can change between the search and the payment, because of dynamic pricing. The fares themselves usually reach these sites through the airline IT systems underneath.