~ : `Arzoo' :~


Sabeer B hatia has relaunched A rzoo.

Arzoo.com is a one-stop travel shop and is re-launched with vision, ‘To be your preferred travel partner for India’. It caters to different consumer segments including families planning for vacations, business travelers and individuals.

Arzoo.com offers its customers the ability to book domestic and international flights, make hotel reservations, buy domestic and international vacation packages, find weekend gateways and find service apartments.

The unique value proposition of Arzoo.com is that customers have multiple choices to make travel reservations. They can either make reservations through internet or by sending an SMS or by calling the toll free number. In India, Arzoo ensures delivery of paper tickets and hotel vouchers at customer’s doorstep, an Arzoo.com statement said.

Very soon, Arzoo will launch its US-to-India operations to serve customers in the US.

About Sabeer :
 (For those who know not about the co-founder of Hotmail)

Born in Bangalore, India and now an SF (US) resident, Sabeer Bhatia has come to represent the pinnacle of success to thousands of computer-industry workers both here and in his homeland. It’s not just the fact that he created Hotmail that’s made him a cultural icon and national (Indian) hero – it’s also the way he played hardball with the world’s richest man. After coming to America to get his master’s at Stanford, Bhatia sat in a cubicle at Apple for awhile. It was during this period that Bhatia and his buddy Jack Smith hit upon a then-revolutionary idea: to provide free email access to users from any internet-accessible computer on the planet. It was such a simple and universal concept that he couldn’t believe it hadn’t been conceived, so he and Smith got to work immediately. By the time Microsoft came sniffing around a year later, Hotmail already had 10 million users. Gates and company tried, quite literally, to bully Bhatia into selling Hotmail for $160 million. But, possessing an almost otherworldly calm, he held out, enduring the Microsoft investment team’s notorious temper tantrums. In 1998, on his 29th birthday, Bhatia finally sold for $400 million (today, Hotmail signs on 250,000 new users a day and is worth $6 billion).
 
Bhatia also has an ambition: to wire India to the internet via a newfangled cable TV connection, creating the conditions for a socio-economic revolution and (he hopes) eventually bring his home country out of poverty and into the computer age. Indeed, Bhatia seems the most likely candidate for the job.