Take Flight With cFares CEO Vajid Jafri

Vajid Jafri is CEO and founder of cFares, a travel site for finding inexpensive airfare.

Vajid has 25+ years experience in the travel industry, with over a handful of companies under his belt. His experience as a veteran entrepreneur is interesting, since most of us are just starting out or have just a few notches on our belts.

What strikes me as most interesting is how cFares and other companies are tackling a huge, stodgy market – the airline industry. People have been buying airline tickets the same way for many years, and now that things are online that’s starting to change. But it’s not enough to put things online and claim a ton of innovation or success; there has to be more to it than that. If that’s all we do with an industry then any problems that existed originally would remain.

cFares has a very aggressive approach, you get that impression immediately from Vajid’s thoughts on pricing, marketing, etc. And while some of it may come across as bravado, I think you need that to succeed in such a large, entrenched and competitive market place.

The Interview

1. Please provide us with a bit of your personal background in business and entrepreneurship.

I got my bachelor’s in engineering and then went on to get a master’s in engineering from Stanford. While I was working toward my master’s at Stanford learning about computer technology, I saw a great opportunity to apply computer technology to much-needed change within the travel industry. In today’s environment, neither the airlines nor consumers are achieving the best possible deals because of a 30-year old infrastructure upon which the $100 billion US air travel industry is based.

Before I launched cFares, I founded several other companies that were dedicated to creating technology solutions for the travel industry: Excambria, Docunet, TeleTix, Jafcom Systems and Tri World Travel. During the past 25 years that I’ve been involved in the travel arena, I’ve always been interested and passionate about finding ways to improve services for travelers. For instance, I founded and grew Tri World Travel into one of the top ten B2B travel companies, and at Docunet, we developed the first SuperATM that books and delivers airline tickets, event tickets from Ticketmaster, and cash. The travel industry offers so many opportunities for improvement, especially within the online arena. The first-generation guys like Expedia and Travelocity surfaced almost ten years ago, and now we have newer meta-search sites that provide consumers greater access into ticket availability and transparency. I believe there are many opportunities for advancement within the online travel industry that can benefit both consumers and airlines, and this conviction is what led me to establish cFares.

2. Your current venture is cFares – what’s your elevator pitch for it?

cFares is the first online travel search engine that, aside from all of the fares available on the various travel web sites, provides its members with direct access to wholesale consolidator airfares saving travelers hundreds of dollars on airfares, particularly on international air travel. cFares also provides consumers with airline fares that are dynamically created at the point of sale to give the consumer a fare lower than any fare in the market (think, “Just In Time Pricing”). We have solid relationships with the top airlines and consolidators that allow us to bring deeply discounted airline inventory, typically unavailable on any other travel site, directly to consumers via the Web.

3. There’s a ton of competition in this market. In fact, I did an interview some time ago with the CTO of Kayak.com, Paul English…what makes cFares unique?

cFares is different from any other site on the web for the following three reasons:

1. For the first time, cFares has brought bookable wholesale/consolidator tickets to the online market. About 20% of the total US Airline market ($20 billion) is sold through wholesalers, who commit to large blocks of seats, a year out in time, for very deep discounts. These seats have traditionally been sold through offline retail travel agents. cFares’ proprietary technology allows us to bring these deeply discounted fares and their corresponding inventory online for consumers to book in real time. This offering can result in savings of tens to hundreds of dollars on economy tickets and hundreds of dollars on business and first class tickets.
2. cFares patent-pending, Dynamic Pricing Engine allows partnered airlines to respond to cFares market search results, and based on those real time search results create a one-off price for the consumer, to beat the market. The result is that the consumer gets a lower than market price that does not exist anywhere else in the market, and the airline gets a customer without changing its overall market pricing, and without its competition even knowing that such a price existed in the market. The price is created for an instance to make a sale, and then ceases to exist. This is the next generation of yield management for the airlines.
3. cAgent (Patent Pending) fills a major need that the consumer has today. While cFares can bring the best fares in the market at a given point in time (from Online Travel Agencies sites, Airlines sites, Wholesale/Consolidator databases), the fare that the consumer’s budget allows may not exist in the market at the time the consumer is conducting their search. Since search is a snapshot of the market at any instance, the market itself is very dynamic and is constantly changing. There are over 55 million fares in the market and 1.5 million of them change every day. It is for this reason that consumers usually go back to the market two or three times to see if they can find a lower fare. cAgent acts as your personal travel agent that is constantly checking the whole market for your specified fare because you did not find it in your original search at cFares. cAgent will constantly search for best available fares and grab the newly loaded fare for you, if it becomes available, before anyone else can get a hold of it. It will hold this fare for you for 24 hours, and present it to you when you get up in the morning, with complete details of airline, stops, connections etc. If you like the itinerary, you can book it at that fare, if not, you can release it; there is no charge or obligation to you.

When you conduct a search at cFares you get to see a summary of the search results, once the search is finished. In the summary, we show you the lowest fare that is available at cFares. We also show you the lowest fare at the Online Travel Agencies (Orbitz, Travelocity etc.) and if you choose to book there, just click on that fare and we will take you there; we also show you the lowest fare at the Airlines’ sites, and if you want to buy that fare, just click on that fare and we will take you there instead.

4. In looking around at what others have said about cFares I found a very honest review at GigaOM. Liz’s point there was that cFares needs to offer up more for free to really fit into the lightweight, Web 2.0 travel sites that are so predominant and popular. Its business model isn’t really aligned with the Web 2.0 style of site (where free is so prevalent.) How would you respond to that? Are you doing anything to change the perception and offer more for free?

Good question – cFares is in fact a free service for any traveler that wants to search and purchase publicly available airfares. By signing up as a free Gold member, people can also perform a cAgent search to find an airfare they want. The vast majority of our members and visitors use our site for free.

Because we have aligned ourselves with top airlines and consolidators, we are given exclusive access to even more deeply discounted airline inventory that we pass along to our paid members. Platinum members can purchase these fares set at an even greater discounted price, as well as purchase tickets found through cAgent.

The Platinum membership set at a low cost coupled with the savings one will get via cFares more than offsets the Platinum fee within only one to two purchases. This is particularly ideal for frequent business travelers and international and luxury leisure travelers.

5. How many employees do you have at cFares now? Is it important that they all share your entrepreneurial spirit and drive? How do you find that in new hires and keep that entrepreneurial energy alive?

We currently have about 20 employees at cFares and are recruiting some additional “A” team players. We seek people who are passionate about what we are doing. They believe in our vision, and know that great teams will build great companies. They are more interested in creating a great company, that is a leader in its industry, rather than just getting a better paying job.

6. What are the most important elements for a successful startup company?

A lesson that I learned early in my entrepreneurial career was “find a need and fill it” and you will build a successful business. Travel happens to be a huge business, therefore when you fill a need of the masses you stand to build a huge business. Once you have identified a need, then you need to develop an elegant solution that fills that need better than anyone else has done it. You then assemble a great team that can execute on that vision. All the team members have to share in that vision and have a passion about what they are doing. All businesses will have their fair share of obstacles to overcome, but a great team will pull together in difficult times and work its way around any obstacle. For them “failure” is not an option.

7. You received funding from Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Fund. Can you give us a bit of detail on the process of finding funding, and what importance you put in picking the right funding partner?

Garage Technology Ventures is touted for identifying and bringing next-generation technologies to the forefront. cFares is built on transforming an established but deficient industry with disruptive technologies, and Garage thrives on investing in teams, markets and solutions that are willing to tackle areas of change with much-needed innovation. Having access to Guy and the entire Garage team allows cFares to tap into solid industry experience.

If you’re looking for funding, it is so important – maybe more than I can stress – to have the support and backing of investors that share the same vision as you and your venture. Investors are inundated with proposals, so it is vital that all parties understand and agree on how the technology can be adapted into a viable and practical product or service that brings needed value to marketplaces. Make sure you got your pitch down to a science and that you have a solid management team that can help you build upon your vision.

8. Is there room in the online travel market for more competitors? Have you seen any recently that seem interesting?

As vast and dynamic as the travel industry is, there is always room for new entrants and competitors to look at improving the 30-year aging infrastructure. While there are likely to be interesting new startups popping up in the travels space, what is important is for cFares to be completely focused on our goal of successfully providing the lowest fares in the market period.

9. It seems that word-of-mouth plays a significant role in marketing and promoting cFares. Do you do anything to help instigate more word-of-mouth and grassroots marketing initiatives?

We are committed to delivering value and savings to travelers. We believe that if we deliver this value to our customers, they, in turn, will tell their friends and family, and we appreciate and value the viral word-of-mouth power from our existing customers. Our rapid growth is testimony that word of mouth is spreading virally, and the world is finding out that there is a site that is consistently delivering prices lower than any other site on the Internet. This stands up to Jupiter Research’s report that 88% of all consumers travel purchase on the web is driven by price, and if we continue delivering on that lowest price promise, we will become the darling site for the consumer.

10. If you want people to remember one thing when they think about cFares, what is it?

cFares gives travelers more visibility into and access to cheaper flights more often than other online sites. We take the hard work out of comparison shopping and deliver great value in savings on travel. Ultimately, cFares consistently finds me the lowest air fares.

Conclusion

Thank you to Vajid for taking the time to do this interview. I’ve never used cFares for finding cheap airfare (or any other site except for Expedia.ca) because they typically don’t handle Canada very well. And, I don’t travel that often. But under different circumstances I would most definitely pursue the best possible pricing for travel very aggressively, because it’s generally too expensive to fly as it is (at least from and within Canada.)

Have you tried cFares? What about other similar sites?