TripAdvisor® is the world’s largest travel site, enabling travellers to plan and have the perfect trip. The site offers trusted advice from real travellers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features (including Flights search, TripAdvisor Mobile and Instant Personalisation) with seamless links to booking tools. Nikhil Ganju, Country Manager, TripAdvisor, India speaks exclusively to T3 and shares his thoughts on the way forward for the travel industry. On TripAdvisor’s key value proposition Our value proposition is great because what we have done is changed the way people plan their holidays. What we offer is akin to advice from a trusted friend as we have real travellers who visit places and share their experiences online. With 15 million users logging on to our website every month, there is a staggering amount of user generated content on the website that is much more useful than any marketing campaign or guide book. Also from a consumer perspective, they can discover hidden gems in terms of unknown hotels and destinations. We have consistently found out that several smaller hotels have topped our ratings based on the quality of service they render. On the site there is a forum that has a 24×7 active community. Hotels are another concrete piece of our business and as part of our ‘TripAdvisor for business’ we are now providing an opportunity to hoteliers to connect directly with travellers. We now have a business listing where we list the contact details of the hotel on top of the reviews so that travellers can immediately connect to the hotel if they so desire. On TripAdvisor’s commitment to contribute to the growth of the travel ecosystem in India We have a dedicated group of enthusiastic travellers who are completely passionate about travelling and sharing their experiences with cotravellers. 98 percent of all the questions raised are answered within 24 hours by our destination experts. We have moved from wisdom of word of mouth to wisdom of friends with our ‘instant personalisation’ feature where once a user logs in and looks up a destination it immediately connects to their Facebook page and they can get their friends to comment on the destination/ hotel. We also have a global event called ‘Master Class’, which we will start in India where we invite hoteliers to discuss aspects relating to online reputation management, how to respond to feedback and gather reviews. On their latest ‘Health During Travel Survey’s’ extremely interesting insights into consumer behaviour which would serve as a good read for travel enthusiasts and commoners in general Our ‘Health on Holiday’ survey conducted amongst over 3,000 Indian travellers has shown some surprising trends. 91 percent travellers put their diet between moderate and very healthy and 80 percent said they sleep adequately on holiday. Our survey has shown some interesting trends about Indian travellers who do tend to indulge but are also starting to keep a watch on their habits while on holiday. The usual frenzied schedules leave little time for people in cities to attend to their health. As a result, urban Indian travellers are beginning to look at their holiday as a wellness break, and as an opportunity to rehabilitate their normal unhealthy habits. Used to sedentary urban lifestyles, 74 percent people admitted to being more physically active on their holidays. Spa treatments (24 percent) and yoga (12 percent) comprise of people’s healthy regimen during holidays and mountains (47 percent) score over beaches (36 percent) as being a more rejuvenating holiday experience. However, purchasing health insurance does not seem to have caught on as an essential part of travel planning except when travelling outside the country, with 56 percent respondents claiming they get insurance only for international travel. In line with being considered the more cautious gender, 66 percent women said they opt for insurance during overseas travel compared to 50 percent men. On the emerging base of internet savvy travel enthusiasts in India There is a huge potential in the field. Of the 100 million Internet users in India, currently about 40 million actively research and plan their travel online. In terms of our growth we are doubling in size every year and hope to become the number one travel site in the country soon. In fact the value that we bring to the table is evident when you see that our reviews are used by other travel portals like yatra.com and cleartrip.com. On the way forward The focus is to continue on our impressive growth path and partner with other travel players, airlines, hotels and tourism boards of states and help them gather and develop content. We have a series of impressive online marketing campaigns that we hope to attract more users online. We attract more than 3 million users now and have over 15000 Indian hotels and over 1300 destinations listed, which is poised to grow further.
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