Can Social Media Save The Day For Online Travel?

by | posted: March 24, 2009 5 comments


Recently Social Media as a term touched an all time high on the google trends chart and this followed by one of the bloggers at Mashable asking the question whether Social Media was an Industry in itself.

So social media is big globally and its just getting bigger. The other industry that is big but is facing hard time is the online travel industry. According to this report a few days ago both online and offline travel players were having a hard time converting any business this summer. The report states that online players like Yatra.com have seen a fall in conversions from 12% to 7%. According to Sachin Bhatia of Makemytrip even international travel has been down since a year. On a macro level according to the Travel Agents Federation of India, an apex body of travel agents, only 20 to 30 per cent of the inventory has been sold.

Given the above status can one say social media is the opportunity for travel players? The answer is YES!

As per this article social media marketing is driving conversions for travel players globally. Look at this chart below:

While both the above graphs are global in nature its not difficult to believe that the same theory could be applied to India where social media is pretty big with over 12 million orkut users and with twitter meets happening often and where facebook could attract a nationwide campaign against politicians. All in all it may be the time for travel players to give social media marketing a real thought and drive results from the same.


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Rajiv Dingra

Rajiv is a prolific blogger who has over 1000 blog posts to his credit at WATBlog. The Founder & CEO of WATMedia our parent company and the Chief Blogger at WATBlog, he has been the driving force of the WAT Evolution. Rajiv does some excellent analysis of the digital media industry in India and often brings out deep insights with his inimitable style of interviewing. Just mail rajiv|at|watblog|dot|com and it will reach him..

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5 Responses to “Can Social Media Save The Day For Online Travel?”

  1. Reply
    rahul
    March 25, 2009 at 11:35 am #

    and bail you out in turn? LOL. pathetic post.

  2. Reply
    Rajiv Dingra
    March 25, 2009 at 11:39 am #

    @rahul: Thanks for your feedback Rahul.. But We dont run a social networking site yet so I dont understand how it bails us out and from what?

  3. Reply
    rahul
    March 25, 2009 at 1:11 pm #

    oops. did u forget to mention u run watconsult, which gets paid by idiots to do social media for them??!!

    grow up.

  4. Reply
    Rajiv Dingra
    March 25, 2009 at 1:34 pm #

    @rahul:

    Hehe.. The very fact we didn’t mention WATConsult was because this post wasn’t a pitch to promote it. But thanks to you now people know about it. :) Thanks for the extra business mate. :)

  5. Reply
    Rajiv Dingra
    March 25, 2009 at 1:36 pm #

    @rahul: Also by any chance did we take your business away and this is why you are wasting your time being jealous? We are sorry for that. We never call clients idiots maybe thats why they came to us :)

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