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After being acquired by Flipkart, Cleartrip is planning to become a ‘full stack’ Indian travel portal by adding new segments like bus ticket booking, railways, cabs, holidays and holiday activities, said a top official. Cleartrip has a multifold plan to become the next big Online Travel Agency (OTA) gthat will take on MakeMyTrip and Yatra.com, among others.
Ayyappan Rajagopal, CEO of Cleartrip, said, “Cleartrip has a clean interface and a good business model. It hasn’t even spent so much on marketing. Despite that, it has a strong air travel business. This leaves us with a lot of potential to do more with the portal.
“For 2022, we have a clear roadmap. We want to be a full-stack player and not a segmented player, but this will be our sequence of growth,” he explained.
So far, air tavel and hotel bookings have been the core of Cleartrip’s business model. “It will continue to remain so, However, we will follow it up with buses, trains, cabs, holiday packaging, holiday experiences and activities,” as part of the company’s plan to grow for 2022 and beyond, he said.
Once these segments have been achieved, it plans to get into the visa and forex segments, followed by cruises.
A browsing and discovery platform
Ayyappan, who was recently appointed CEO of Cleartrip, said the company doesn’t want to stop at just being a booking platform. It wants to be a browsing and discovery platform, too. He explained that holiday travel inspirations come from Instagram or destination discovery and planning happens from Google.
“This is a very early plan,” Ayyappan said, adding that what he is looking at is how to get people inspired to travel through Cleartrip itself. “We don’t want our potential customers to go to Google to search for a destination and then come to our platform for booking a service. We want the funnel to start with Cleartrip. We want Cleartrip to be seen as a discovery and browsing platform.”
The last goal Ayyappan has for Cleartrip is to ensure that the recovery in bookings is sooner than the travel industry, thus garnering more market share.
For this, “we are investing in tech, and people. Compared to the first half of 2021, we are sitting at a 50 per cent higher talent force. We want to double it by the end of this year. We want to grow it by 100 to 150 per cent over all,” he said.
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