US-based TripAdvisor, the leading online platform for travel reviews, recently acquired GateGuru, a mobile application for flight and airport information. With nearly 3 million users in India, the online travel review firm is looking to tap the potential of the online hotel booking space. The company recently rolled out a feature called meta display that has hotel price comparison on a single page. The company claims its portal has more than 200 million unique monthly visitors and over 100 million reviews and opinions covering more than 2.5 million accommodations, restaurants and attractions. Nikhil Ganju, Country Manager, TripAdvisor India, spoke to Business Line about the company’s plans and strategy post the recent acquisitions.
How important will the recent acquisition of GateGuru be from the India perspective?
Most of the recent acquisitions have been in the mobile space. In March, TripAdvisor bought Beeem Inc, which developed Tiny Post, a photo captioning app. In April, it acquired New York-based Jetsetter.com, a private sale site for hotel bookings.
Our focus will continue to be in the mobile and social media space. The GateGuru app has robust information on airports across the world, including India. The airport layout, amenities and outlets in the airport are all in the app. It is a review based app that also includes information on flight products. These are the reasons why it fits in well with the India market.
How has the meta display product helped you?
Considering the fact that we are a travel planning site and not an online travel portal, the vast majority of our traffic is for hotel reviews. So that’s the segment which is very significant for us. We recently also rolled out the meta display feature. It has dramatically improved user experience. This enhancement allows users to see hotel pricing options and availability from booking partners on a single page. It has now been released across the world and in mobile apps.
We are witnessing higher conversion rates after the launch of this feature. The meta display was launched in May in India.
How do you ensure the accuracy of the content?
We get more than 60 reviews and contributions every minute across the world. The scale ensures accuracy. Two years ago, we had 25 contributions every minute. We have a content monitoring international team that focuses on the quality of content coming in. Apart from that, we have sophisticated automated filters for every review. The moment any review looks suspicious, the team looks into it.
How important is the India market and what are the plans?
We have a great focus on Asian markets such as Japan, China and India. In terms of traffic, India is among the top five in the world. According to ComScore, TripAdvisor India has nearly 3 million users. In terms of traffic, TripAdvisor India has grown more than 100 per cent over the last one year.
The internet user base in India is about 150 million, the third highest in the world after China and the US. Likewise, it is not surprising that the traffic is high from India.
TripAdvisor offers its content in 21 different languages. We are right now present in English in India. But we are considering launching the web site in other Indian languages. We want to reach out to the Indian language market.
What is your revenue model in India?
A part of our revenue comes from business listings, which is a subscription-based annual fee, targeted for hotels. The hotels pay us a fee to put up their contact details. While the user will have a choice to book it from an OTA, the hotel would also want to seize that opportunity. Then, there is the pay per click and banner advertisements. About 80 per cent of our revenue comes from pay per click and 10 per cent comes from business listings and another 10 per cent from banner advertisements.
Globally, the US is the biggest market for us. But the majority of the revenue comes from outside the US.
Online hotel booking from India is still very low, and we see a great opportunity of growth there. As that improves, monetisation will also go up. The banner advertisement rate in India is very low compared to other countries and traditional forms of advertising are still strong in India.
What has the mobile app space done for TripAdvisor?
Mobile traffic worldwide for TripAdvisor was 45 million users every month on an average last year, which is 15 per cent of our overall traffic. About 15-20 per cent of the total traffic from India comes from the mobile segment and the rate of growth is twice than that of desktop traffic.
So far, we have witnessed 32 million downloads of our TripAdvisor mobile app. In fact, every minute 25-30 apps are being downloaded. We expect this figure to increase dramatically. On the mobile space, much of the traffic comes for reviews on restaurants. But on the desktop, the traffic is more for hotels.