Expertspeak: The online travel market will boom

WE have seen a huge boom in the travel industry over the past few years and anticipate this growth to increase manifold in years to come. Even in today’s busy life, people make time to travel, not just because they need a break but also to explore what’s new and unseen.

We’ve seen a huge growth in online travel content in recent times. From travel blogs to trip planning sites, the Internet is brimming with information; targeted at not just inspiring you but compelling you to make travel plans.

The government is committed to investing in travel and tourism infrastructure. From construction of highways and new airports to a high-speed rail network, we are becoming a tourism ready country. From medical tourism to travel for leisure, we have become a travel hotspot!

Also, Indians are now enjoying more privileges when travelling abroad. From all international airlines serving Indian cuisine to visas on arrival for nearly half the countries around the world, planning a foreign trip is now easy. Trends such as adventure tourism, quest for offbeat destinations, hostels, backpacking, homestays and branded budget hotels are making travel fun and affordable. You can choose between staying in a luxury property or a well appointed budget hotel, all with a few clicks on the same website.

Online travel makes up close to 70% of all e-commerce in India and we are poised to become the third largest online travel market in the world by 2020, with over $20 billion of travel transactions projected to be carried out online annually by then. Google estimates online hotel booking market in India will be worth $1.8 billion by 2016. A large part of this growth is being driven by the growth of smartphones in the country which will number 500 million by 2017.

At ixigo.com, we have gone from 15% of our traffic coming from mobile phones in 2013 to over 78% today. Tier 2 & Tier 3 audiences are growing, and so is the need for localised and personalized content. We foresee three megatrends playing out in 2016 for travel apps.

Personalisation and localisation: The world will move away from spammy notifications to personalised, contextual emails and notifications by applying knowledge of the search and buying history of travelers as well as their context. By applying predictive analytics to the big data sets, apps will show more relevant content and customised user experiences for individual app users. We should also start seeing more localised content with Indic languages as well as nuances that solve for local tastes.

Intelligent assistants: We will see intelligent virtual assistants (powered by artificial intelligence or humans) emerge, with concierge services becoming more automated and apps solving a lot of issues.

Crowdsourcing and communities: As apps start to grow to millions of monthly active users, we will see communities emerge within those apps’ ecosystems to help each other out with advice, interactions and ideas. These communities will crowdsource and curate the content of these apps to make it an even richer experience.

Being at the forefront of the travel industry as we have always been, we at ixigo are quite excited to make some of these ideas a reality for our industry.