The Hindu Business Line : Cleartrip.com turns focus on hotel services

Mumbai, July 6 If you are a traveller worrying about your accommodation in a good hotel when you travel next, your search could be powered with interactive details of the place you want to stay.

Apart from knowing the prices, the distance from the nearest airport or railway station and other basic data about the hotels, you could see images and videos to get a first hand feel of what the experience is going to be like. What if someone simplifies it further by saving you the pain of visiting individual sites of these hotels?

The travel portals are attempting to do just that. Cleartrip.com, one of the Indian travel portals, spoke to Business Line on its similar initiatives. Mr Stuart Crighton, Chief Operating Officer, said, “It is not like choosing your airline, where one buys a ticket at the best price available. For accommodation, the experience needs to be more tangible. The traveller needs to know about the surroundings, the amenities and more such information, which require visual details.”

Mr Crighton was unwilling to divulge the the venture’s investment details. “It needs support starting from technology to resources, research, supply base and other similar elements,” he said.

Though the portal offers choice of accommodation in the budget hotel segment, the COO feels there could be a separate category for these hotels. “It is very small right now, but should hit the ground in 2008,” he added. With its core business in booking airline tickets and hotel accommodations, Cleartrip’s revenues have gone up to Rs 60 crore from a meagre Rs 10 lakh when it started on July 4, 2006, he said.

Explaining the business model of a travel portal, Mr Crighton said, maximum investments go into advertising as “acquiring and retaining customers is the key to this business”. The travel portal spends around a Rs 30 crore on advertisements in print, online and television media, he said.

“As of now we cater to 80,000 customers, of them 60 per cent are unique, which means they are first time visitors and 40 per cent have visited us again.”

Currently, the portal offers bookings only in the domestic segment (airlines and hotels), however it plans to foray into the international market by the end of this year, said Mr Crighton.

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