Published on : Wednesday, July 22, 2015
The first quarter this Financial Year has taken off to a flying start at Cleartrip. The accommodation space continues on a strong growth trajectory, similar to last quarters. We saw an 83% growth in searches (YoY, Q1’15) and 120% growth in room nights (YoY, Q1’14) booked through Cleartrip, a strong indication that Indians are not ones to stay at home over long weekends or during vacations.
Feeding in to the strong industry demand, Cleartrip continues to offer all-round planning and payment flexibility to its customers. In a fresh approach to payment options, we launchedpay@hotel a year and a half back, and we’re thrilled to see almost 20% of our bookings come through that channel. This shows us a very healthy mix of customers, comprising advance as well as last minute planners, both categories growing exponentially.
That demand also drove us to introduce another convenience payment feature this quarter which allowed part–payment for domestic hotels. Delightfully accepted, part-payment on Cleartrip just two weeks post launch, already shows a 10% utilization, a quick, easy and worry-free adoption.
Accommodation booking on Mobile stood it’s ground in great stead. Almost 45% of hotel transactions on Cleartrip this quarter came via mobile phones. A stand-out trend observed here was that mobile was a more popular mode of booking accommodation for the last minute and / or solo traveler. A behavior typically noticed amongst travelers on-the-go.
32% of our mobile bookers were seen to prefer more 4 & 5 star hotel bookings, a tad higher than the 20% bookers who selected 1 to 3 star hotels on mobile. Consequently, the average transaction size of mobile turns out to be higher v/s desktop.
Customer choices too, made an interesting collection, this quarter. Coming right through the peak summer holidays, several hill-stations showed up as the preferred choice of place – Mahabaleshwar, Manali, Ooty, Kodaikanal being the most prominent ones. Certain newer international destinations like Las Vegas, London & Shenzhen came to the fore, too. All these, with a significant growth rate over last year.
With the onset of the beautiful, lush monsoons, we’re hoping to see an even further rise of Weekend Getaway bookings, from the already spiraling 127% increase in bookings that we saw in Q1. Weekend Getaways are the power-naps city-revelers look for the most, to break monotony and routine.
At Cleartrip, we’re very bullish on investing in the accommodation space, and what keeps us going gung-ho is the highly encouraging response we receive from our customers. All we’d want is for your travel booking experience, to be as much fun as your travel itself.
Tags: Cleartrip, kodaikanal, Mahabaleshwar, Manali, ooty
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