When was the last time you booked a ticket using one of the online travel portals like MakeMyTrip or Yatra? Even if you think that was long time back, chances are high that you used them at least to check on the prices or ticket availability. That’s because an overwhelming majority of urban Indians do it that way.
A new study by Nielsen shows that nearly 80 percent of Indians plan their holidays using online travel portals. “Indians” is a broad generalization here, because the study covered 842 metro, Internet-savvy Indians who had traveled by air in the past one year. I s**k at statistics, yet I think it is fair to say that this is a very small sample that just accounts for a small minority of the entire sample set. Nevertheless, assuming that we are only talking about metropolitan Internet-savvy people, the study still throws numbers of high significance.
Here are some more numbers from the study – 77% of those surveyed had used the travel portals for airline information, 65% for train information and 59% used them to seek information on hotels. What is significant is not this, but the fact that these big numbers shrink when it comes to actually booking the tickets. Whilst only 34% of the people book airline tickets using these travel portals, only 17% use it for hotel booking. The train booking numbers are smaller at 14%, but that is a fine considering most train bookings happen via IRCTC.
Are these smaller numbers a cause for worry? In my opinion, not really. Firstly because it is fair to say that the number of actual conversions are likely to be lesser than people visiting it because there are numerous avenues online and offline for people to get the best deals. It will however be interesting to see how the conversion-to-visitor ratio stacks up for the different portals individually. That will probably be a good case study on which of the portals is doing good in attracting the right converting audience.
A second reason why these numbers are not a cause for worry is that exposure is key in this segment with such a cut-throat competition. If someone is going to visit MakeMyTrip over Yatra (or vice-versa) to check for prices, it only means that MakeMyTrip has done it right in getting on top of the mind of these customers, who can eventually bring revenue someday. That day should not be far away considering that the best days are just returning!
