By BW Hotelier
’2014 was a great year for travel; with uniform growth across destinations and all category of hotels,’ according to Amit Taneja, Chief Revenue Officer of Cleartrip (see photo). A phenomenal 165 per cent growth in traffic and 100 per cent growth in transaction volume was witnessed-(YoY, Q3’14 vs Q3'13), he added.
According to the recently released Cleartrip Quarterly Accommodation Insight--hotel room rates in this quarter (Q3’14) went up on an average by 5 per cent in non-metro destinations and the average room rate in metros witnessed a 10 per cent growth, as a result of higher business and leisure traffic. The two long weekends--Gandhi Jayanti and Christmas resulted in a 500 per cent growth in check-ins with destinations like Goa, Mysore and Jaipur leading the pack.
To help customers plan their breaks, on the go, Cleartrip recently launched an added feature of weekend getaways on its iOS and Android apps. Early data from it suggests that though Mumbai has a higher proportion of destinations in the city’s vicinity, destinations around Delhi and Bangalore have contributed to more than double of the transactions.
Mobile bookings, usually a last minute resort, were being used for Advance reservations as well. The stats reflected that almost a third of hotel booked on the app were made 15-days in advance. It also saw a higher preference for book 4 and 5 star hotels for mobile users, in comparison to those who booked on desktops.
With the travel market expected to pick up further in the coming quarter along with better-than-ever consumer sentiment, Taneja fervently believed that the growth in the accommodations segment is likely to sustain further in the coming year.
’The channel shift of consumers from booking accommodation, from traditional offline channels to online and mobile channels, will accelerate further in the coming quarters,’ he hoped.
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