Archana Sharma – New Delhi
The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) organised the fifth Travel and Tourism Summit at Shangri-La’s Eros Hotel, New Delhi. The summit focussed on digitalisation and growth of mobile users and their online consumption, while also detailing solutions that online space could provide for better experience.
Emphasising on the need for curation and personalisation of content for customers, Sharat Dhall, president, Yatra Online, stated, “With over eight million mobile devices presently, there has been a 20-25 per cent growth in the travel bookings via mobile. Therefore travel companies should step up customer offerings and customise the content in order to provide the same experiences with all the different devices available along with history and recovery.”
Delving further on the subject, Rajesh Magow, co-founder and CEO, MakeMyTrip.com, talked about the changing peak time. “By 2016, there will be about 330 million mobile internet users. Presently, on an average, an individual spends around 72 minutes online. About 13 per cent of the transactions are done through mobile phones these days and therefore the travel service providers should take advantage of these trends and build a programme to reach more travellers, making up for the time that India has missed on the internet revolution, technology and infrastructure development.”
Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO, ValueFirst Digital Media, said that travel and tourism applications are the seventh most downloaded applications by smartphone users, as nearly 52 per cent of consumers research extensively before committing to a booking.
“Today travellers are intelligent and know very well what to see and what to ignore. They are quick to understand and therefore travel companies need to approach customers with relevant and engaging content,” stated Hanneli Slabber, country head, India, South Africa Tourism while discussing the approach of social media to customer service.
The summit also explored the advantages of going digital for the hotel industry and ways to tactically outsmart the competitor. Arif Patel, regional director- sales and marketing, Starwood Hotels and Resorts talked about the pilot programme of smart check-in of Starwood Hotels in the US, while Abraaham Alapatt, chief innovation officer and head marketing and customer service, Thomas Cook mentioned about the ‘Silver Brakes’ programmes for affluent senior citizens.
Prasanjeet Dutta Baruah, head-marketing, The Oberoi Group, further elaborated on this by saying, “There is no split between leisure and business traveller online but the content and strategy should be such that the brand is being is promoted as well as the customer achieves his desired results.” While all the delegates agreed on the changing trend of increased online presence, they also maintained that a balance has to be created with the offline services.
