Frenzy on the web

Online travel in India is booming "" the number of online travellers has gone up and so has the number of travel portals.

That's probably why travel websites feel the need to promote themselves aggressively in order to differentiate themselves from the others in the market. Look at all the television commercials from principal players such as makemytrip.com, yatra.com, travelguru.com and the like.

According to Dhruv Shiringi, co founder Yatra.com, "Since there was a need to create the category in the first place, we had to adopt aggressive promotional strategy to create awareness."

This view is shared by Sachin Bhatia, chief marketing officer, makemytrip.com. "The focus was to let more people know about the conveniences of online travel and draw more users."

Yatra uses TV in a big way to promote the brand, but to publicize its offers and other marketing activities it takes recourse to print and the online medium.

Online is also the preferred medium of publicity for makemytrip, followed by TV and print, accounting for as much as 40-50 per cent of total ad spends.

"The need to advertise on TV arose when we wanted consumers to know who we are and what we offered," says Shiringi of Yatra. Most of the communication is usually centered around new offers being provided by portals.

Along with TVCs, ad budgets have also been steadily rising. Yatra spends about Rs 20 crore annually on advertising and promotions and the figure has increased considerably in the last couple of years. Even makemytrip has a budget in the range of Rs 30 crore for promotions.

The strategy seems to be not to focus on any one sub-category, say hotels or air ticketing, but on the overall services provided by these portals.

But a special focus, generally, of the advertising has been on holiday packages for the summer season. "It is a growing category and the spends will continue to rise," feels Shiringi.