Cleartrip sees huge potential for growth

Travel portal Cleartrip is targeting gross sales of $800 million this fiscal.

“Our gross sales have doubled during the first half of the current fiscal compared with the corresponding period last year. Flight and hotel bookings are growing at 90 per cent and 120 per cent year-on-year. At the current rate, we expect the transaction growth to double month-on-month,” the portal's Chief Marketing Officer Subramanya Sharma said.

Following the steep and steady increase in hotel bookings, Cleartrip, which has 25,000 hotels on offer across 800 destinations in India, plans to strengthen this to 50,000 hotels before the close of the current fiscal.

“Our focus will be on tier III and IV towns. Currently, most of them (hotels) are in the two- and three-star categories. We will also be looking at others, the unlisted ones, as there are a whole lot of them in smaller towns,” he said.

According to him, the demand during festive seasons and long weekends is almost five times higher than normal days, and Coimbatore dials in on Cleartrip mobile showed 505 per cent growth year-on-year.

“Coimbatore plans travel on-the-go and we are seeing extraordinary uptake in bookings made from mobile devices. Mobile bookings from this region saw a 374 per cent growth compared with other cities in India,” he said.

Sharma noted that people in smaller towns embraced mobile devices a lot more than those residing in bigger cities. “Mobile penetration is huge and the growth is close to 500 per cent, whereas desktop growth is a mere 30- 40 per cent; this could be the reason for higher traction from mobile devices.”

Steady increase in the use of mobile has also resulted in the company strengthening its R&D investment on the mobile platform. “While our overall focus will be on mobile, we are also looking at activities offerings. Such activities offerings could contribute to 10-15 per cent of our overall revenues,” Sharma said.

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