“If you mention cricket, you’ve got instant rapport. There’s a natural affinity between India and New Zealand,” says Serko's Simon Young. Photo / Photosport
“If you mention cricket, you’ve got instant rapport. There’s a natural affinity between India and New Zealand,” says Serko's Simon Young. Photo / Photosport
Serko’s acquisition of corporate travel reservation system GetThere has proved to be a springboard into India.
Serko’s strategic acquisition of GetThere from Sabre was completed in October last year.
It not only added a significant online booking tool to Serko’s portfolio but gave the New Zealand-based travel technology company aready-made development team operating out of Bengaluru, India.
Chief technology officer Simon Young says the acquisition enabled Serko to bypass the complexity of starting from scratch in a new and unfamiliar environment.
“We were looking for a new development hub and wanted to expand our global footprint. When we had the opportunity for the GetThere acquisition, India became our top choice.
“There’s a good saturation of the knowledge we need for our business. In particular, we found people with corporate travel knowledge. That comes from Sabre’s strong presence there. There are lots of folk working in the same domain as us there so getting people with travel knowledge is easier than in New Zealand.
“We didn’t just get engineers, we got people who already understood corporate travel,” Young says.
His colleague, Serko chief marketing officer Nick Whitehead says many of the company’s leadership team had prior experience working with Indian teams, including himself at Expedia.
Young says there is a cultural connection, in part due to the Indian expats working in tech roles in New Zealand.
And then there is cricket.
“If you mention cricket, you’ve got instant rapport,” says Young. “There’s a natural affinity between India and New Zealand.” The company has supported this by encouraging two-way travel — sending New Zealand staff to India and bringing Indian leaders to New Zealand.
Whitehead says Bengaluru is a competitive and vibrant tech hub. “There’s fierce competition for talent. We’ve hired senior leaders from Uber and others, who then attract great talent.”
Serko chief marketing officer Nick Whitehead
To win in a tight market, Serko had to invest in local branding and recruit top-down.
Young says the team is “phenomenally talented”, and the perception of India as a source of only junior, low-cost labour is outdated. That may have been the case 20 years or so ago, not today.
Running the Bengaluru hub has allowed Serko to tap into India’s expertise in running global operations.
Whitehead says: “They think in terms of global command centres,” noting that India’s fast-developing infrastructure and deep technical base provide a strong foundation for scaling.
And that is factored into Serko’s plans. “We’ve got big ambitions to grow substantially, and the experience we’ve had to date in Bengaluru shows that we can get really good quality talent there. We need good leaders,” says Whitehead.
Attracting talent in India means building the company’s brand. “We found everyone there reads the Hindustan Times in the morning, so we advertised in that newspaper. That’s not something you’d think of doing here if you want to reach technology candidates. We’ve also been doing PR in general to become a more visible brand.”
For now, India is not a core customer market for Serko, though that is likely to change over time.
Whitehead says: “It’s the eighth-largest business travel market in the world, but its structure differs from Western markets — especially in areas like payments and procurement, which remain manual in many cases.”
Serko faced some regulatory hurdles. Establishing a local presence required navigating paperwork, bank set-up, and director appointments.
Young says this all took a long time, but there was nothing insurmountable. Serko had set up a company in India years ago and was paying a local director because that was easier than shutting down and starting again.
It’s less than a year since Serko acquired GetThere and the experience has been positive. Young says: “It’s been a great way to expand our global footprint. We’ve learned a lot, the quality of people has been outstanding, and it’s laid a strong foundation for the future.”
