Thirty six-year-old Rahul Biswas, a mid-management employee at a multinational IT company based out of Mumbai, is planning a last-minute trip to the US this holiday season. Tired of browsing through various travel guides and consulting agents to plan his 15-day itinerary, he looked no further than to his smartphone to do most of this work.
Courtesy the considerable increase in mobile phone usage in India, giving rise to greater demand for a myriad of mobile apps, travellers like Biswas are now taking to these apps to plan their entire holiday trips, right from booking travel to managing itineraries. And, gearing up to cash in on this demand are travel websites, both domestic and international.
For instance, MADfares.com, a travel site launched with the aim to help corporates, multinationals and Blue Chip companies cater to their travel needs through its extensive inventory, is currently testing its mobile app for flight booking, which it claims will be ‘easy-to-use, cost-effective and enable fast check-outs’.
“We believe that mobile application is going to be the next big thing in the e-commerce industry. We see a huge potential here,” says Gagan Randhawa, co-founder of MADfares.com. “We are planning to beta-launch our mobile app in the next three to four months and commercially roll it out in three months from then.”
MADfares.com is currently working on Android, Blackberry and iOS (iPhone operating system) for Phase-I of the launch, to be followed by Windows 8 in Phase-II. It is also coming up with a mobile and tab-optimised B2B (business-to-business) portal for its corporate customers and travel agents.
“Our mobile travel app, to be christened ‘Madfares’, will see more elements being incorporated, including car booking and interactive options to address users’ queries, in Phase-II,” Randhawa says, adding that the company is expecting at least 30% of its annual transactions to be generated via its mobile app in the next two years.
According to analyst firm Juniper Research’s report ‘Mobile Apps Stores: Future Business Models & Ecosystem Analysis 2012-2016’, the global market for consumer mobile apps is projected to be worth $52 billion a year by 2016. Over 31 billion mobile apps were downloaded in 2011, the report says.
Also jumping on to the mobile apps bandwagon is Wego, a Singapore-based travel meta-search site, whose inventory includes 350,000 hotels and over 500 full-service and low-cost airlines. The company has operations in Indonesia, India and Australia.
“Mobile development should come before desktop development. We live in a mobile world and want to stay connected. This is particularly true to travel. Options need to be accessible on any device and operating system, round-the-clock,” says Jackson Fernandez, general manager, Wego India.
Wego currently operates localised sites in over 50 countries and 30 languages worldwide, and in Q3 of 2012 referred in excess of $1.2 billion in potential bookings to the websites and its travel partners.
“We are seeing 20% month-on-month growth in the number of users in India that are accessing Wego via a mobile device. And, their profile is very strong, viewing more pages than a desktop visitor. At present, we are developing in-house mobile apps designed for a wide range of mobile devices. We are letting our many customers in India decide how they want to consume our products and services. We will be making the announcements early in the New Year,” Fernandez adds, while keeping the features of their yet-to-be-launched mobile travel apps under wraps.