Online Travel Industry in India and web analytics status
Continuing from recent post on Current Internet status and web analytics opportunities in India, this post focuses on Online travel industry in India
Before you proceed! here’s what the post is all about
- Current Online Travel status and emerging trends
- Top Travel sites in India and Web Analytics Tool Used
- Summary of opportunities
India is clearly an emerging leisure online travel market, attracting millions in start-up funding,the Indian online travel industry is in full form.Online travel is expected to be a $2-billion industry. Interestingly, more than 17 per cent of all the flight tickets booked in India are done via Internet websites.
Online travel company MakeMyTrip (MMT) has recorded sales of Rs. 1000 crore for the financial year ending March 2008, as per a release. However the air ticketing space has seen margins erode and with competition coming not only from other travel sites but also the airlines themselves, MMT has started looking at other avenues like railway ticketing, tour packages and even bus tickets.
Yatra Online is another well funded travel portal that is looking at raising more capital. The company is looking at offline retail outlets for selling its travel services to grow revenues. They have a planned outlay of Rs. 20 million over the next 12 months for the offline retail initiative. They have also roped in SIFY as a partner and Yatra services can be availed of from over 7000 SIFY cyber cafes across the country.
ClearTrip is looking at adding international ticketing to its service offering. The company has raised $12 million so far and is also yet to break even.
A new trend in this space is that of meta search engines. Ixigo and Ezeego are two players in this space. A meta search engine searches all the online travel sites (including the airlines sites as well) and displays the best deals for the user. Meta search engines can aggregate special deals from airline websites that aren’t offered to OTAs. They can also aggregate special deals from OTAs themselves (some of which the OTAs pay for out of their own pockets), thus giving consumers a wider choice, and often better rates.
International players like Expedia and Travelocity have already set up shop in India. Both of them are focused on hotels and bring to the table a strong technology back end and ready access to a huge inventory of international hotels. Travelocity has added air tickets to its set of services
What’s Latest?
Travel websites, such as Make My Trip India Pvt. Ltd and Yatra Online Pvt. Ltd, are battling to win over India’s Rs16,000 crore ($400 million) religious travel market. Both companies control about 90% of the online travel market, according to Phocus Wright, a company that analyses travel market, and both said they are interested in expanding their fast-growing religious travel segments. There will be packages for all: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Jains.
Oppurtunity in Online Travel Industry: $2billion
Let’s now take a look at Web Analytics Status/Implementation/Tools used for Top 10 Travel Sites in India.
Web Analytics Tool Used: HBX
Overview of WA: Make my trip uses HBX, with HBX now taken over by omniture and if makemytrip decides to go with omniture it certainly would be first few companies to use omniture. Makemytrip using hbx clearly shows that they are keen on web analytics!
Web Analytics Tool Used: Google Analytics and DGM track (probably)
Overview of WA Tool Used: Nicely implemented site! Going a step ahead than merely implementing the general code. Campaign tracking seen.
Opportunities: Some of Features contain “ajax” and which seems to be not tracked
Web Analytics Tool Used: None
Overview of WA: Cleartrip is a great vertical search sites! gives quick result and a must mention hotel booking which looks great. I followed the process from choosing flights to logging in, but i was surprised not to find “any” web analytics tool installed. “May be” they are just going with log files.
Opportunities: They need one badly! with such a great UI and such good features a firm certainly needs to understand how visitors navigate thru their site.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Urchin
Overview of WA: ezeego1 uses urchin, with just basic implementation. It looks like ezeego1 having urchin to understand traffic.
Opportunities: Ezeego1 is a great site! it not only has flight booking feature, but hotels, visa, car cruise, forex! lots of them. To understand which of these products/services work better a good analytics tool is must.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Statcounter
Overview of WA: I was surprised by the WA tool used by Arzoo, no GA ?? as the name goes seems they just need the traffic figure
Opportunities: Arzoo certainly needs a WA tool, atleast Google Analytics to start with. I dint go further to explore the options but this site falls in the category which provides more than flights and hotels.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Google Analytics, DGM Flight and Hotel Tracking
Overview of WA: So here’s a combination of couple of tools, GA looks to be default, and a tool called DGM Flight and Hotel Tracking code exists. ( which i should admit iam not aware of)
Opportunities: It feels like there’s different tracking of traffic and search done, this certainly does not lead to a successful WA tool implementation. There is a great improvement scope here to try and get “one” dedicated provider to do that.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Urchin
Overview of WA: A Fair good implementation of Google Analytics, the search criteria captured in js might be used in conjunction with Google analytics.
Opportunities: Indiatimes is a big name in India internet, they have been around for a while. Indiatimes on a whole is huge network of sites serving various verticals. Indiatimes certainly needs robust tool to help increase user experience and engagement.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Google Analytics
Overview of WA: Basic Use of Google Analytics, filter and other basic features seen
Opportunities: This is a great site! i love the rich features here. Lot of ajax and easy to use UI is a great USP for this site.
Web Analytics becomes important to understand how these features are being used and this site certainly requires some advanced tool.
Web Analytics Tool Used: Omniture
Overview of WA: I was surprised to see omniture on travelocity, but since this site belongs to same as lastmintue.com, so that made it obvious. Implementation can be improved! lot of unnecessary codes and pagename (foundation of ominture) seems to be not in the order.
Monthly Traffic:
Web Analytics Tool Used: Urchin
Overview of WA: Basic Use of urchin, i bumped into a under construction page and found no analytics code in there.
Opportunities: A Clean Implementation is required! Period
Summary:
To summarize all of above, Travel industry is a vertical which has huge online presence in India and growing. All the firms are now expanding their services apart from just providing air tickets and stay. The competition increases as more service providers join the race and “this is where web analytics plays a key role” for a firm to be step ahead.
So undoubtedly this would help Web Analytics Agencies and also lead to increased Job Openings for web analysts in the Online Travel Industry
In the next post! again related to Travel industry will focus on the latest trends and marketing efforts done in India.
What do you feel about the Travel Market in India!, Pen down your comments/feedback/critics
Disclaimer: This survey of the Web analytics tool used is done just to explore and understand the current status of WA in Online travel Industry India. If you do find any information which is not updated or incorrect. Feel free to reach out via comments or Mail and appropriate changes would be made.
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Comments
10 Comments on Online Travel Industry in India and web analytics status
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Mayank on
Fri, 6th Jun 2008 7:12 am
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Anil on
Fri, 6th Jun 2008 7:21 am
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Ravi Pathak on
Mon, 9th Jun 2008 5:45 am
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Anil on
Mon, 9th Jun 2008 6:21 am
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madhav on
Thu, 26th Jun 2008 12:53 pm
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Anil on
Thu, 26th Jun 2008 1:21 pm
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Amish Keshwani on
Tue, 1st Jul 2008 10:21 am
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Anil on
Tue, 1st Jul 2008 11:14 am
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Praveen Dwivedi on
Wed, 9th Jul 2008 4:49 pm
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Anil on
Sat, 12th Jul 2008 10:53 am
Very interesting article. Thank you for the research.
Glad you found helpful!, thank you for the comment.
Hi Anil,
Very nicely put together information.
I think there is a bigger problem ,Indian Online travel industry is plagued with is all focus is on acquisition of customer and almost negligible focus on customer conversion. Obviously, all of them focus on how can they cheaply get a consumer to get to their site and thats it. few really understands that increasing user engagement will hugely drive conversion. Also it is less cost effective to increase sales via increase in conversion than to increase in acquisition of customer. However, this scenario will change very soon.
I think as a suggestion, you might also want to cover hotel industry too !
Thanks
Ravi!
Thanks for the comment and your suggestions 
yes absolutely i will cover that too!, agree on the amount of time and money spent on acquisition. My next post is all about marketing trends in online travel that’ll support what iam saying here.
And yes, engagement leads to building relationships! and loyality, measuring this combined with other self service tools is a MUST to understand what drives conversion.
Hi Anil,
That’s a good research work and was very useful for travel industry enthusiasts.
Regards
Madhav
Hey Madhav
Glad you found it useful!, Thank you for your kind words.
Hey Anil,
Must say a very detailed observation. I agree with you about the Increasing market trend. In fact I observed that, In India now people started doing online booking , thanks to Online Payment Gateways & Online Banking , it is now possible for the common man to book the tickets online , do the online reservation in hotels & shop as well. I believe that, in coming years the trend will go upwards & India will have a lot more opportunities in online market.
Web Analytics will play a crucial role for the companies to understand the visitor behavior & apply the changes to make it “USER FRIENDLY”. This will open up a new era for Web Analytics professional in India, but at the same time, we are lacking of trained HR in this field and I am quite afraid that, as the same story might get repeated which is currently with SEO/SEM field. I strongly feel that, there should be some professional body in the field to train & provide right kind of resource to the market.
Amish
Thank you
Oh yes! and i agree Online payment gateway and banking has seen an huge upward trend and it’s role in E-commerce is “big”.
And yes thanks for your input on the WA Professionals perspective, certainly a good point and feedback like these will help us come up with a forum/group which will help address such issues.
Hi Anil,
really this is great Analysis,
I want to thank you for such efforts.
Indian travel market is growing state.now people are trying to eshopping.
This is really positive trend for ebusiness vertical.
Praveen
Thank you for the comment, Glad you found it helpful
Cheers
Your Comments, Critique, and views are welcome!...
