Comments
Delhi-based online travel portal, EaseMyTrip, which has claimed to book close to 8-9 lakh air passengers per month, is looking to step up its hotel reservation and travel packages business.
According to Nishant Pitti, co-Founder and CEO, EaseMyTrip, nearly 95 per cent of its business currently comes from flight bookings.
The remaining 5 per cent accounts for hotel reservations, travel packages, and train and bus bookings.
“Planning travel packages for consumers gives a better yield as compared to the margins earned from flight bookings. So the target would be to increase the share of holiday packages and other businesses to close to 20 per cent by 2020,” Pitti told BusinessLine .
The company clocked a business of ₹1,957 crore in 2017-18 and is expecting a turnover of ₹3,000 crore in 2018-19, a growth of over 50 per cent.
The profitability is expected to be close to ₹50 crore. EaseMyTrip is yet to disclose results for FY19.
EaseMyTrip makes available close to 20,000 hotels spread worldwide through its portal. Plans are afoot to increase this number to 15 lakh by the end of this fiscal.
While some of the addition would be through the direct contracted model, the remaining would be through agents and other websites.
The company has entered into a tie-up with the Malaysian Tourism Board, for promoting outbound tourism from India to Malaysia.
It is also in talks with several other international tourism boards for specific tie-ups, said Rolly Sinha Dhar, Vice-President, Corporate Sales, EaseMyTrip.
Surge in business
Close to 30,000 passengers book air tickets through the website on a daily basis, and the numbers have been growing by around 50-60 per cent annually.
Moving forward, the company is hopeful of sustaining the growth momentum, and aims to achieve a 50 per cent rise in turnover by the end of this fiscal.
While there is stiff competition in the online travel space — with multiple companies such as MakeMyTrip, ClearTrip and Yatra vying for a share — EaseMyTrip’s policy of not charging convenience fee from its customers gives it an edge over other service providers, he said.
The company has over 42,000 registered agent partners, and more than eight million direct customers, close to 85 per cent of which are repeat consumers, he added.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.