Diving deeper into the customer preference data collected using Netcore’s smart platform, HelloTravel, travel and holiday marketplace has revealed several key trends that highlight the changing Indian travellers’ preferences. With increased penetration of smartphones and availability of cheaper data subscriptions, travellers are nowadays researching more on mobile than on desktop for family vacations, luxury travel, and couples travel or honeymoon.
According to HelloTravel, though the growing number of discerning travellers in India have switched to social media for researching on holiday packages, email remains the most effective and preferred channel for conversions. In FY2016-17, HelloTravel doubled the volume of inquiries — and experienced a 5X growth in the last three years — via social media.
The data insights also highlights Indian travellers are emerging out of their bi-annual vacation cycle, which was largely skewed to suit the period of summer and winter vacations in the country. Data showed that on an average India’s leisure travellers take two-three vacations a year and they put a lot of thought into planning these trips.
There has been 20% jump in vacations per year in last year and a major shift has come for weekend getaways. As much as 20% travellers today go on a vacation every alternate month. However, there has been eight per cent drop in average nights spent per trip last year and 20% increase in trips a traveller takes per year – pointing to the trend of more weekend getaways that is growing at a 5x year-on-year rate.
There is also a spike in the volume of outbound travellers. In the last three years, HelloTravel has seen 100% year-on-year growth in inquiries of outbound travelers. Indian leisure traveller follows a conventional path when it comes to landing on foreign land. 90% of outbound travel happens to only 20 countries. With respect to the locations, inquiries have tripled for countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bhutan; and around 150% growth in inquiries for Europe.
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