Presenting below the key points from a recent study on mobile usage in Travel domain in India
Mobile is here and now in India
In India, mobile adoption is higher not only in cities, but also in small towns.
Mobile is the best channel to reach people in the age range of 15-34. And, the reach in mobile is better than via television.
Indians spend about 72 minutes on mobile, this is by far the highest compared to any other medium/channel. At the current growth rate, mobile usage is expected to reach 310+ million by 2015.
India tops the list (among all countries across the globe) for usage of video and social media in mobile.
Mobile influence in the Indian travel industry
In India, a fifth (20%) of search queries for the hospitality industry come from mobile devices. Last year, this number was between 12 and 13%.
Examples for hotel search queries: “hotels in Delhi“, “4 star hotels near Bangalore airport“, “Bed and breakfast hotels in Kerala“.
In terms of overall search queries in India, mobile queries have already surpassed queries from desktop and hotel search queries made in high end devices (HED) have already overtaken queries made through WAP mobile devices.
HED volumes on accommodation related queries have grown by 410% year-on-year (December’11 to ’12) while tablet volumes on accommodation related queries have grown by 260% year-on-year for the same period.
India has a total of about 130,000 to 170,000 room nights. Budget hotels generally don’t offer discount over the call center, whereas, few star-rated hotels offer discounts (compared to the rates in various distribution channels) over the phone.
Of the total flight bookings, between 5 and 10% are from mobile devices. With respect to the hotel industry, less than 5% bookings are from mobile, but these numbers are increasing month-on-month.
A total of 15 million people book buses online. Of this, 20% of bookings are from mobile websites and native apps.
Overall summary:
The mobile channel is growing fast. It’s very clear that people are now living in the post-PC era. Travel companies who do not have a mobile website or a native app have to think about creating one soon. Brands that have these have to think about optimizing them and adding more features considering the post-PC traveler.
In this scenario it will be interesting to keep in mind that Teknokraaft has proven solutions for developing an OTA and also a mobile extension to the OTA using which users can book for Flights and Hotels using their smart phones. Please contact us to know more about our "OTA on mobile" solutions.
Study conducted by Google along with Travelclick and Ideas.
News Courtesy: http://www.tnooz.com
Author: Manoj .S
Manoj works as Team Lead in Teknokraaft and looks into the Flights vertical primarily.