Just in case you were wondering where we went, we’ve decided to reduce the frequency of our newsletters. Why?
Because we need to focus on other battles for the time being and allocate resources more effectively. Plus we feel we can improve the quality of our insights by reducing the frequency with which they are shared. I’d love to say that we can keep hitting it out of the park every day but that’s simply not true, and even if we somehow could, you wouldn’t notice that we were if we did it every day. Make sense?
Alright then, welcome to the ultimate break down in travel.
We’ve sliced this industry up in every way that it matters to offer you a real glimpse into what’s really going on. We’re going to share our own unique take on potential opportunities within the industry but we encourage you to draw your own conclusions.
The catch? It’s not all for free.
This newsletter is broken up into 3 distinct parts:
- Part 1: Free: This section focuses on the macro’s of the travel sector
- Part 2: Unlock with a tweet: This section focuses on details like most popular cities & booking schedules
- Part 3: Paid (Rs. 2500): Inclusive of all the 3 sections + the raw data in excel: This section focuses on individual players in the travel industry and how they stack up against each other + we’ve thrown in an OYO special.
For a more detailed view of how this report is structured, please go to the end of this mail to the post script section.
Part 1: Macro trends in travel
In order to understand where the real meat & volume of the travel business is we looked at the broad industry trends across 5 main segments to study which is getting the most traction. These sections are:
- Flights
- Hotels
- Buses
- Train
- Others (refers to organized tours, holiday packages etc.)
We’ve also provided percentage distribution of bookings across these categories — with and without trains. As you read on, you’ll understand why.
This is where most of the companies you read about in the papers are currently focused.
Flight volumes may vary but since they mostly make money for only the airlines, it is difficult to monetize this user without some element of cross sell. Which is where the uptick in hotel booking volumes is significant — as travel patterns in India evolve, this is where returns for OTAs can potentially improve.
Now, take a look at the same data — inclusive of trains.
Not surprisingly, despite a patchy safety record — trains continue to dominate Indian travel. The scale of train travel as a segment of the Indian travel market is awe inspiring.
It tells us two important things: there is still a massive opportunity to build services around rail travel. Over 20 million people use the Indian railways every day, ticketing is just the first point of service for these customers. Secondly, the runway for the rail to air shift is still long and straight.
Booking Frequency across OTAs is also an interesting indicator — in that it is not only a sign of consumer confidence but also user stickiness.
GoIbibo’s transaction frequency has consistently been the highest in the market. But perhaps more interesting than the continuity of that one statistic — is MakeMyTrip’s dramatic decline and Yatra.com’s ascendance in the same period.
If you look at Year on Year (YoY) monthly data (refer to table below) across this one metric for the March to August period for 2016 and 2017, you’ll find that the only OTA to have consistently improved YOY performance in every month is Yatra.com
Part 2: City Pairs and Booking Schedules
In this section, we’re exploring the top city pairs by different modes of transport and how long before their dates of travel do users typically book their tickets.
This data is particularly interesting since it tells us how different travelers tend to plan their travel + potentially when and where to target them.
City Pair- Where are people travelling to?
If you’re an OTA / an investor in the travel business, get in touch and we can give you this booking data broken up across portals. It will help you understand which city pairs you are losing in, to whom and in what time frame leading up to the date of departure.
Tweet To Unlock
(You will receive a PDF with all the data unlocked)
Part 3: Market Shares, Company Specific Comparisons, and the OYO Special
Travel has been one of the most invested in sectors in India and globally. Not just because it offers large markets with a high transaction frequency but also because GDS’ offer enterprises the ability to plug local inventory and make it available to customers across the world.
Market Share by Install in Travel(Broken up by Business Model)
- OTAs
- Meta Search/Lead Gen
- Travel Content Based
- Holiday Sales
- Hotels- Aggregator and OTAs
Market Share by Transaction
OYO Special
- Relative Market Share by App Installs — OYO vs. OTAs
- Relative Market Share by Transaction Volume (3 month moving average) — OYO vs. OTAs
- Avg Duration of Stay (2 months moving average) — OYO vs. MMT vs. GoIbibo
- Booking Frequency (3 months moving average) — OYO vs. OTAs
- Relative Distribution of Hotel Bookings by Top Cities — OYO vs. MMT vs. GoIbibo
Pay Rs. 2500
(You will receive a PDF with all the data unlocked and an excel sheet with the raw files for all sections)
Thanks for your time,
Ashish Kapoor
Team KG
Originally published at kalagato.com.
