Most travel portals are catching up on the festival spree that starts right from the months Aug-Sept-Oct each year as the volume of travelers through Air, Road and Rail increases. The travel portals are coming out with a lot of discount offers such as Buy1-Get1 FREE or 50% cash back as a promotional tool which might give them the desired results and profits over a period of time.
Noel Swain, vice-president – Marketing, Cleartrip says:
“We had similar tie-ups with low fare airlines such as IndiGo and SpiceJet,”
Recently, Cleartrip.com has entered into an agreement with GoAir to offer 50% discount tickets for travelers traveling on weekends i.e. saturdays and sundays.
As the Navratri celebrations start from today across India, many travelers from Mumbai and across the country visit places such as West Bengal, Gujurat or even their home towns for a 9-day long vacation to visit their respective temples of gods and goddesses, especially Mother “Amba” and Mother “Kaali”. The timing to offer ‘cool deals’ by travel portals such as Yatra Online, Cleartrip, ezeego1, MakeMyTrip, and Travelguru is excellent. This move might be a very calculative move as they want to increase the number of passengers that travel by Air. Also, If a passenger buys a ticket from any of the domestic for a cheap price or with a 50% cash back price, it will encourage them to buy a ticket again from the same domestic airliner.
Meanwhile, ezeego1 has entered into an agreement with Air Deccan to offer Buy1- Get1 free tickets for the festive season that will be applicable until the end of the year.
Ajay Prakash, the general secretary of Travel Agents Federation of India (TAFI) was quoted as saying:
“It is not (as if) airlines are giving them huge discounts for their bulk purchase. But they (the portals) have money to burn. They have received lot of money from venture capital funds”.
However, Himanshu Singh, Managing Director – Travelocity agrees that most of the travel portals are losing or rather burning money, he affirms:
“However, our strategy would be different (from discounting). Services would be the differentiating factor”.
It is ultimately the strategy that is creating a lot of competition in the online travel market. The competition is getting tougher and tougher because all of these travel portals coming out with somewhat similar deals. We will have to wait and watch if any of these portals come up with any unique and innovative strategy that enables them to capture the online travel market that was 2% of the offline market and is currently 6% compared to the offline travel market. The market is expected to be 10% by end of year 2008 so the competition is bound to grow by each passing month.
On a related note, worth reading a comparative analysis by Monica Jasuja on ‘Indian Online Travel Services’ at http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2007/09/indian_online_travel_services.html
Here is the concluding part on the comparative analysis of Indian online travel portals. Nothing short of an eye opener.
http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2007/10/time_for_makemytrip_to_pull_up.html