With its rich cultural heritage and diverse scenic and experiential offerings, India should be among the top tourism destinations in the world. While there is ample awareness about these offerings and great interest in India as a travel destination, the potential hasn’t been realized to the fullest. The World Travel Organization predicts that India will receive 25 million tourists by year 2015 fuelling the India shining story. Domestically, young Indian travellers with a large disposable income coupled with a desire to explore are contributing to the Indian tourism and hospitality sector at a growing rate.
In an attempt to derive efficiencies of scale, a sizeable share of hotel inventory is sold online nowadays. At MakeMyTrip, we offer over 100,000 hotels – of which 10,000 are in India and the rest spread across the world with a greater concentration in South-East Asia.
Constant transformation has made the Indian hotel industry more functional and practical. The standards of facilities and services offered have evolved over the last decade towards the extensive use of technology, environment friendly services, pricing, market segmentation, and regional preferences. However, there is still a long way to go in comparison to developed countries.
Nearly 20 per cent of our traffic searches hotels through their mobile devices. This is a huge opportunity area and smarter Hoteliers will find a way to provide compelling offers/look-&-book experiences on the mobile platform. Location-based solutions and geo-targeted offers will help drive engagement with the customer and ensure top-of-mind recall.
While hotels and intermediaries are investing in Technology to increase touch-points and customer-access, there is also a need to create awareness among target customers. Indian travellers are still wary of making online hotel reservations and that assurance needs to be built in by ensuring that they have a consistent and satisfactory post-sales experience.
This is where an intermediary such as OTAs can help. Since customers are fairly confident of purchasing travel-products online from their preferred portals, our collaboration with hotels can translate into increased transaction and user-engagement. MakeMyTrip has enhanced focus on its Hotels Line of Business and made huge investment to lower the entry-barriers for customers. To further strengthen our hotel value-proposition for travellers, we launched an offer of 100% money back guarantee on hotels last year, which has been extended this year as well. This is primarily a confidence-building measure to get more customers to buy hotel inventories with the assurance that MakeMyTrip will offer money-back if their experience at the Hotel is different than promised while booking. This year we also launched Last Minute Deals on hotels for impulse and business travellers, offering deeply discounted deals for same-day check-ins. This offer is available both on our web and mobile platforms in order to cater to the needs of the on-the-go traveller.
We expect the segment to get very active as more portals realise that this is a lucrative business. Hotels will continue to embrace the online medium to sell their inventory while OTAs innovate to build greater customer-confidence in this category. Offers and discounts will run galore this travel season and the real winner will be the customer as Hotels and OTAs work in tandem to promote online hotel-booking.
