ZUJI celebrates four years of online travel expertise

Online travel agency ZUJI is celebrating its fourth birthday in Australia, and in Asia Pacific. After four years of solid growth ZUJI today revealed a new logo for the organisation and a new walk-in, free-of-charge, Internet booking kiosk facility in Sydney.

ZUJI has established itself as a leader in online travel, with consistently impressive year-on-year growth statistics, most recently experiencing year on year revenue growth of 65% to end Q1 2006.

The redesigned ZUJI logo features new colours, layout and three hand-drawn stars, reinforcing ZUJI’s international connections with its parent company, Travelocity.

ZUJI’s online travel product range is also expanding; in July 2006 an additional 12,000 hotels were added to the stable, bringing the total amount of hotels up to 72,000, with 50,000 independent travellers’ reviews to help inform consumers’ booking decisions.

ZUJI is also expanding the team in Australia to fully incorporate both Online Travel Corporation (OTC) and ZUJI team members into one office, and as a result has relocated its Australian headquarters from Market Street, Sydney to larger premises in Blue Street, North Sydney.

The new premises feature a first for ZUJI – an in-foyer Internet kiosk – which allows the public to research and book travel on zuji.com.au. This service will be supported by a help-phone linking directly to ZUJI’s professionally staffed call centre and a reception counter for paper ticket collection and offline payment should the customer prefer.

ZUJI Australia’s General Manager Peter Smith commented: “Our business has evolved significantly over the past four years to now incorporate 30 team members based in Australia, and more than 300 team members regionally. Changes to our logo and premises are important milestones for ZUJI as we come of age in the Australian market.”

“As an AFTA member, here at ZUJI we fully endorse AFTA’s campaign to encourage travellers to only use AFTA licensed travel agents (both on and offline) when booking travel. At ZUJI our service is available 24/7 and our fully trained customer service centre is open seven days a week with extended opening hours.”

“When the ZUJI site went live in 2002, we estimated that seven percent of travel bookings made in Australia would be purchased online by 2005. Figures show that the amount of travel bought online is increasing at an unexpectedly rapid rate, with a 23 percent increase from 2005 to 2006. Online channels are projected to generate 60% of all U.S. travel gross bookings by 2008. Whilst we’re not America, we’re certainly never far behind.”

“What this means for ZUJI is that we are in a fantastic position to continue to offer great value travel, exclusive deals and enhanced products and technology into 2007.”