Indian OTA Cleartrip is seeing a strong take-up of its recently launched activities channel and confirmed ambitious plans to add more content in more cities over the next year or so.
Subramanya Sharma, its chief marketing officer and head of product, told Tnooz how Cleartrip's focus on activities had become a key part of not only its overall product mix but also its thinking around the mobile web versus app debate, still a source of much discussion in the Indian e-commerce market and beyond.
Cleartrip launched the activities channel this August and Sharma acknowledged that "the level of demand is quite surprising, particularly from locals as well as travellers." Inhabitants of Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi in particular are booking activities in their own city.
The channel launched with 2,500 bookable activities in 25 cities; it now has 3,500 products in 35 cities and hopes to be doing 10,000 transactions a day by FY2017 with activities accounting for 10-15% of total revenues.
The product is sourced by a mix of dedicated feet on the ground talking to operators, and through its existing series of city-specific market managers. There is a back-end platform which operators use to load their inventory into the Cleartrip system "which takes care of curation" and there is also a support centre where operators can talk to Cleartrip and have their content loaded manually.
Sharma explained that the activities channel was launched in response to the emergence of unbundled travel in India over the past 18 months.
"Traditionally buying the flight and hotel as a package was a dramatically cheaper option," he said. "But as airfares came down and hotels became more easily available online, people can construct their own package at a lower price. Activities are an important component of a trip, and we wanted to be able to offer them as well as the air and hotel."
The other trend which prompted Cleartrip to get into activities is the continuing increase in mobile traffic. Earlier this year, India's leading fashion retailer Myntra announced that it would become an app-only business and drop its desktop and mobile web presence. Cleartrip offered an alternative view and decided that it would upgrade its mobile web site while maintaining and developing its apps.
"The mobile web and app environment will co-exist for some time to come," said Sharma.
It is interesting therefore that Cleartrip's activities channel is currently only available as an Apple, Android and Windows app. They can't be booked via the desktop or its mobile site.
Sharma explained that Cleartrip was using the two mobile channels in different ways. "Mobile traffic - mobile web and app combined - is bigger for us that desktop," he said. "It's about 55% and this is growing by 2%, 3% every few months. But as much as traffic we look at engagement as a parameter and that is one way we are positioning ourselves differently.
"Travel is very much a needs-based product, and what we want to do with the activities app is create engagement, in destination or in advance of the trip. By keeping activities on the app we are engaging with people who are building their own package.
"We see the mobile web as better for "discoverability" rather than engagement and we look at engagement as the best way to drive conversion."
Elsewhere, Sharma offered his perspective on the online budget accommodation aggregation sector, another vertical to emerge in India over the past eighteen months. Other OTAs have dipped their toes in the water - Ibibo Group for example has and have launched GoStays, a budget hotel brand of its own.
But Cleartrip is not interested in this pseudo-hotel-management model. "We've got a great relationship with Oyo, Zo and the other brands as a distribution partner and we are not interested in becoming an aggregator," he said.
Its experience as a distributor is that this sector "is growing faster than other hotel segments" and that a significant proportion of the growth is coming from new guests or from people now booking their budget stays online rather than offline.
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