Company Profile
We are the largest and leading online travel company and travel services integrator in Turkey, based on 2016 gross bookings (as per management estimates based upon publicly available company filings). We also serve the online travel markets in Germany, Israel, Russia, Jordan, Egypt, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Libya and an additional 45 countries globally. We strive to provide the most efficient and user friendly solutions to travel agents and individual travelers as well as suppliers to maximize their value and profits. We have a comprehensive product offering, including airline tickets, hotels, packages and other travel-related products. Travel agents and individual travelers can find, compare, and purchase travel products through our websites agent.iati.com and Aerobilet.com. We also provide our network of hotel suppliers with an Internet hotel booking engine solution HotelWeb (“HWEB”) for managing the distribution of hotel products and accessing individual travelers.
We commenced operations in 2011. Our leading position in the Turkish online travel market is due, in part, to our sophisticated technology platform and ability to use our wide network of approximately 79 country representative offices in Turkey and across the globe. Our ability to manage our business successfully through economic cycles will allow us to continue our growth domestically and globally. Since our inception in 2011, we have achieved an average annual growth rate in gross bookings in Turkish liras of approximately 55%.
We facilitate access to all five Turkish domestic air carriers and more than 25 destination-specific and market-specific flight content providers globally (comprising a total of over 275 airlines). We sell hotel visits at more than 2,000 directly contracted hotels in our Primary Market and 200,000 international hotels globally via the integration of 20 wholesalers including Hotelbeds, Miki, GTA, DOTW, and Tourico Holidays. In addition to core air ticket and hotel products, we sell bus and sea bus tickets and transfer services in our Primary Market and transfer services of dozens of transfer companies globally. We also offer dynamic travel packages to consumers using the flight and hotel content on our system primarily through our HWEB distribution channel.
We have built a modular, scalable and secure distribution technology platform that provides easy-to-use interfaces and delivers a superior user experience. Our distribution technology platform primarily consists of three channels: agent.iati.com, Aerobilet.com and HWEB. Travel agencies access our travel products through agent.iati.com. Our agent site empowers travel agencies by helping them realize automatic price adjustments and offering them back office support, including real-time financial results tracking and automated performance reporting. Approximately 40,000 registered travel agencies in approximately 79 countries are currently utilizing our site. In addition, we directly sell travel products to individual travelers through Aerobilet.com. Our Aerobilet.com site attracts traffic organically as well as receives traffic through utilizing Google Adwords and from search engines and metasearch engines that are integrated with our site, including Momondo, Wego, Avisasales and SkyCheck. HWEB is a proprietary Internet booking engine solution designed to help hotel websites convert traffic to sales. We believe that the end user direct booking trend presents an enormous market opportunity. Through offering HWEB to hotels, we not only share profit generated from the increased sales with the hotels, but also capture end user traffic to cross sell our other travel products. Currently approximately 850 contracted hotels are utilizing HWEB in Turkey. We also distribute our products through other distribution channels including our application programming interface integration and our corporate distribution channel.
We provide our mobile device applications to both travel agent partners and individual traveler customers. Our registered agencies can access our entire system via our mobile applications. Our individual traveler customers are able to make bookings through our Aerobilet mobile application available for iPhone and Android, the only travel booking mobile application in Turkey that offers comprehensive travel products.