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Pankaj Maru – Bengaluru
Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Web In Travel (WIT) recently hosted the first edition of India Travel Executive Forum under the theme ‘Deconstructing the India Story’ in Bengaluru. The half-day forum discussed how the Indian travel industry has evolved, overcoming technology and infrastructure challenges to being trasformed by entrepreneurial spirit and innovative ideas of startups.
The discussion witnessed participation from top travel industry executives including tour operators, online travel agents (OTAs) and travel technology startups across India and Singapore. According to Subramanya Sharma, chief marketing officer, Cleartrip, the OTA story started in late 2005-06 but it faced many challenges. “Dealing with infrastrucure and technology challenges in India was hard on oneside and on the otherside, the online environment was not so condusive. Instead of e-tickets we used to deal with paper tickets,” stated Sharma. Mohit Gupta, chief business officer – holidays, MakeMyTrip pointed out that there has been both external and internal challenges. “It took two years in building an in-house team to handle technology development for the company. Hence we had to use a mix model of in-house and outsourced. Beside those technology and infrastructure issues, getting acceptence and recognition from the airline industry was a huge business challenge,”stated Gupta.
However, the growth in internet penetration and mobile phones in late 2000 helped them gain some ground. Aligning with this technology shift, OTAs are investing in innovation as well. For instance, Cleartrip’s mobile platform gets 20 per cent flight and 50 per cent train bookings while 25 percent comes from hotels. “Last week we launched a wallet feature on our platform to speed up the refund process for customers,” informed Sharma.
“Mobile penetration is high but there are challenges on low-cost handsets in terms of platforms, which remains an industry issue today,” stated Avinesh Kumar, head – marketing, Yatra. However, Kumar shared that last minute booking on mobile is high during the weekends. Even the travel industry is seeing a positive impact of the mobile phone phenomena in India. “Smart phones are playing a big role in the last minite booking. Leveraging technology in large scale is actually empowering the customers,” opined Gupta.
With online ticket booking being well established today in India, OTAs have marked entry into hotels booking and selling tour packages online. “We have invested in hotels and technology, which will lead to profits in next few years. Hotels and technology will be the next big story for OTAs,” opined Kumar. The entry of OTAs in the hotels and tour packages has increased the traditional players in India, which has pushed these players to be more innovative in their approach.
Unraffled by OTAs entry into tours and hotels, Ashwini Kakkar, executive vice chairman, Mercury Travels argued, “Internet is great at democraticising prices but internet fails when it comes to face-to-face service delivery.” Kakkar added that the new segment of travellers are the youth in the 18-15 years age group and the senior citizen group. According to Madhavan Menon, managing director, Thomas Cook India invested in CRM (customer relationship management software) across some 200 branches and resellers in India, for providing consistent information to customers. “We stopped printing of brouchers from this year and have provided our staff with tablets that provides digital and video contents to help customers make better travel decisions. From next season, all our in-trip staff will carry tablets along,” informed Menon.
Interestingly, given the country’s unique challenges mixed with different tastes and cultures of the population, Indian OTAs have established unique successful business models in their own way. However, these models will not remain sustainable and profitable always, hence Indian OTAs will need to look into new areas of travel content and contextual search, personalise experience and activities. Though these new areas appear niche, they have high potential to help Indian OTAs drive additional revenues. But this space is being filled by new entrants and travel technology startups that bring the speciality element which these OTAs lack today. According to Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder – Ixigo, the travel industry has a distributed model and its structure favours few of the large businesses but Ixigo has challenged this distribution model. “We are a neutral and non-transactional platform providing meta search travel content and information. Customers are not looking for loads of details or information but they want the most relevant and contextual information at various stages of travel – pre, post and in-travel phases,” said Bajpai.
That’s a new niche area where travel technology startups likes Mygola, Trip38, SavvyMob and others are playing role of catalysts filling in void between tour operators, airlines and OTAs and the travellers community. For instance, Trip38 focuses on post-booking travel expericence offering minute but essential details and information required during a trip. “We provide travel information of locations, sites, food, restaurants around the hotel where the traveller is staying. For example, what’s the weather condition of a particular location or place, timing of food joints, musuem and its ticket price, parks, etc,” said Niranjan Gupta, chief executive and co-founder, Trip 38. Likewise, Mygola has a mobile app that is designed to help individual travellers unlike groups or tours and provides in-travel related personalised contextual content or informations on travel activities. SavvyMob is a mobile app that focuses on mid and small size hotels as well as travellers that plan to look for last minute hotel books. “Our focus is domestic SME market and we work on both sides – hotels as well as customers,” said Bikram Sohal, CEO and co-founder, Savvy Mob.
