Thursday, April 04, 2013

Will Indian Online travel Boom invite M&As?

The Indian Online Travel Industry has witnessed tremendous growth since 2004. Today, it’s the most Crowded space in The E-Commerce Segment with new players joining The Race every year. Question is – how will this Overcrowded space grow spacious?

As more and more Indians turn to the web for their travel needs, the online travel portal market in the country is gearing up for a bigger action in the coming days. With travel portals now offering a host of new services – putting forth their travel packages and providing safer mode of payments – booking travel online is no more confined to getting a low-cost airline ticket. In fact, these portals are now becoming travel guides rather than just ticketing stations. As per comScore’s data for April 2011, the number of visitors to travel sites in India increased 32% compared to last year. The study by the US-based digital market research company revealed that around 18.5 million visitors (age 15 or older visited) turned to the Internet for their travel needs in April 2011. While Indian Railways led the list of the top 10 visited sites, registering 8.4 million visitors this year (an increase of 8% from the previous year), Online Travel Agency sites (OTAs) secured the remainder of the four top spots in the category. MakeMyTrip reached nearly 3.9 million visitors (up 63%) followed by Yatra Online with 3.5 million visitors (up 82%) and ClearTrip.com with more than 2.1 million visitors (up 80%). Interestingly, the US-based Expedia Inc. secured the #5 position with 1.8 million visitors (up 12%).

This clearly indicates that there is a distinct shift in consumer preference as more and more people now prefer to plan and book their travel, and holiday needs online. According to travel industry research company PhoCusWright, India’s online travel market is the fastest-growing online travel market in the Asia Pacific region. What’s more? The company expects the Indian online travel industry to grow at a whopping 28% rate to top $7 billion by 2012. And it’s because of this reason that OTAs are now exploring newer avenues to generate revenues. In fact, revenue from advertising has already taken a backseat, and the focus now is more on cross selling of products, combination of products, et al. Further, with the rise in the sales of non-air products, industry players are confident that newer product categories will be explored in the travel and holiday space.

The increased pumping of money in the sector has also helped portals spend more to attract customers. In the last couple of years, most of the sites broke-even, securing a comfortable position. For instance, Nasdaq-listed MakeMyTrip registered a profit of $3.7 million in Q4 FY2011 as compared to a loss of $1.3 million in the same period last year. Even for the financial year ending March 2011, it had a profit of $4.8 million as against a loss of $6.2 million in FY 2010.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

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