Online travel boom driving meta-search platforms

However, a segment player says buyers find it tough to identify right price and deal by browsing through multiple apps or websites

The rising online travel business, combined with multiple travel portals, is driving the traffic to meta-search businesses in this space. Meta-search engines such as Ixigo and TripAdvisor not only allow price comparison across  sites but also have an option of doing transactions. As for online travel portals, the list is long — the big ones include MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Cleartrip, Expedia, and then there are smaller ones like EaseMyTrip and Big Breaks.

Indian meta-search platform Ixigo aggregates, searches, and compares the best deals for flights, hotels, buses, trains and holiday packages from around 100 travel portals, to provide real-time information at one place.
 

Aloke Bajpai, founder and chief executive officer at Ixigo, which has SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip as investors, said it had become a tough task for buyers to identify the right price and deal by browsing through multiple apps and websites. “We are a kind of Google for the travel sector, as we work with both small and big players”.

Ixigo claims to be executing half a million transactions every month for flight, hotel, train, bus and taxi bookings. Bajpai said the number of transactions had doubled in the past year, as more and more bookings are shifting online. Ixigo mobile apps dedicated to flight, hotels, cabs and rail bookings have seen almost 11 million downloads.

Most of the traffic to the platform is brought by flight bookings, followed by hotels. However, the online share in hotel booking is only about 15 per cent for air travel in excess of 50 per cent. Bookings are seeing rapid growth with mobile sites and apps as smartphone usage is on the rise.

According to Nikhil Ganju, country manager for TripAdvisor, one of the key impediments for online hotel booking is lack of information.

That is now beginning to change, with the availability of easy and verified information. “India is among the top five traffic sources for TripAdvisor globally. These are early days for online booking in India,” Ganju had said in an earlier interaction.

WANDER LUST

• Estimated 8.4 mn Indians to book hotels online by 2016, up from 3.5 mn in 2014
• Indian online hotel sector to be $1.8 bn by 2016 from the current $0.8 bn
• Hotel bookings is one of the least penetrated segments within the travel categories in India; online bookings account for 16% of hotel bookings
• In Europe, 70% of the hotel rooms are booked via online portals

Source: ICRA

TripAdvisor says its traffic from India is seeing a compounded annual growth rate of about 50 per cent.

TripAdvisor, which started as a review platform for hotels, now also allows hotel bookings. Early this week, TripAdvisor announced the launch of a new airline review and an option to book air tickets.

Other leading meta-search platforms are HolidayIQ and Skyscanner.

The rising popularity of such platforms is driving competition among suppliers to offer better price and services.