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| Travel portals gear up as better days return |
| Pradipta Mukherjee / Kolkata Aug 27, 2009, 01:59 IST |
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With business and leisure travel picking up once again, travel portals are going all out to woo consumers with new discounted packages and an increased focus on making the digital medium more user-friendly. A few are also looking at setting up a brick-and-mortar presence to assist high-budget travellers looking for more credit before booking online.
Travel portals like makemytrip.com , yatra.com , cleartrip.com and travelocity.com say tariffs are at their lowest right now — be it at hotels, railways or airlines.
Post October, however, prices are again expected to start picking up due to the overall recovery in the economy as well as the festive season round the corner.
Keyur Joshi, co-founder and COO of makemytrip.com , says: “Because of the higher volumes we handle online, cost per transaction is substantially low for us and therefore it is possible for online travel agencies like ourselves to pass on the price competitive benefits to consumers. We book around 10,000 tickets per day. Compare this with 400-500 ticket bookings per day handled by offline, brick-and-mortar agencies.” The company has seen a year-on-year (YoY) growth of 60-70 per cent in revenues, while online visitors have grown 25-30 per cent.
“Hotel and airline companies are ready to give a sweet deal if it is a bundled offer and in larger volumes. So, while a Delhi to Calcutta flight and a hotel booked separately would cost Rs 12,000 per person, a bundled offer would cost Rs 10,000 or so, if booked online,” adds Joshi.
Going forward, makemytrip.com is working on introducing weekend getaway packages for online booking. These would also take care of local taxis and guides at the tour destinations. “This is a big initiative since it would include overseas destinations as well,” Joshi said. Ashish Kishore, head of hotel and retail business at Yatra.com, said, “We handle volumes of Rs 10 crore per month and this is growing at 25 per cent per annum.”
The company has 12 ‘holiday lounges’ in India currently and is planning to set up more. “Holiday lounges are important for high-end vacation travellers who spend more than Rs 1 lakh per trip. They want to touch and feel before making bookings online. In the last one year we have set up 12 holiday lounges for high-end international travellers. Overall, we see 10-12,000 customers per annum of which 5,000 customers are high-end travellers,” said Kishore.
Cleartrip.com, on its part, has seen a growth of 30 per cent in online traffic with 4.5 lakh visitors on its website everyday. Noel Swain, vice- president of marketing, Cleartrip.com, says: “July to August, which is traditionally considered the lean period for hotel business, has seen a 30-40 per cent growth in travellers during these months this year compared to last year same period.
“We are planning to add more features and search engines on our website to help visitors plan trips better as well as make packages more price competitive. We will install a search engine to return the lowest fares for a specific period. Also, we are working on adding various offers for the next festive season in terms of discounted packages. Right now airfares are 30 per cent lower than corresponding period in the previous year, but may increase by 10 per cent from September. So this is the best time to plan trips,” Swain adds.
Himanshu Singh, managing director of Travelocity.com, says the company has started offering users a 50 per cent discount on the basic airfare for any airline. Also, it has launched a Rs 1,000 cash back offer on booking at any of our 60,000 listed hotels in the world — 1,000 of which are in India. “We are planning to improve the search engines on our website and add new features to offer multi-stop functionalities. For instance, a user flying to New York would have the option to stop in London for two days. The same multi-stop functionalities would be available for domestic destinations also,” Singh says.
Travelocity.com, which recently acquired online hotel distribution network Travelguru, is going to use Travelguru’s four retail outlets to build on its offline presence. “If it proves fruitful, we may look at setting up our own retail chain for offline presence also,” Singh concludes.
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