Cleartrip goes ‘Local’ with experiential services

Online travel services provider Cleartrip, which recorded a GMV of $1 billion in FY 2016, will now offer experiential services too.

The company, which raised its last round of funding five years ago and is not looking for additional funds, has created a new offering called ‘Local’. The service offers four categories — activities, eat-out, events and fitness — that its six million monthly visitors can discover and transact on its new app that will be available from Wednesday.

The app will feature the twin tabs of Travel and Local which users can toggle between. Cleartrip will launch a six-week multi-media brand campaign to introduce ‘Local’ with the message ‘What’s Happening? Lots Happening’ on July 4, also marking its 10th anniversary.

“Local was born from the idea of offering a set of urban lifestyle products to locals in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and other cities. We have allocated an ₹18-crore budget for the multi-media brand campaign to launch Local,” Subramanya Sharma, Chief Marketing Officer, Cleartrip, told BusinessLine .

Experiences Stating that the four categories being offered under Local are all experiential, he said it includes food experiences such as brunch, buffet, barbecue, brewery, fine dining; events such as theatre, art shows, stand-up comedy, music gigs; fitness experiences with 3/12/21-day subscription passes for yoga, zumba, pilates and crossfit in gyms; and over 2,000 activities such as go-karting, parasailing, culinary classes, segway tours and night treks.

Sharma says the inspiration to introduce Local as a twin offering came from the success of Cleartrip Activities priced between ₹100-₹3,000 introduced last October. It has garnered 3,00,000 customers over the last six months, of which 75 per cent are new customers who have made one transaction every 2-3 months at an average transaction value of ₹600.

“Twenty per cent of these new customers have also booked a travel product, which means we have been able to cross sell to new customers. While travel is not a high-frequency business, where a user on an average buys one travel product in six months, Local is a high-frequency business attracting transactions every day and peaking on weekends. Therefore, we expect Local to contribute 15-20 per cent to our revenue this fiscal, generating 10,000 transactions a day at an average transaction value of ₹1,000,” said Sharma.

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