Diwali 2026: Five Travel Brands, Five Different Festive Plays
Air India, AirAsia, Cleartrip, ITC Hotels and a Gulf brand film each ran a different Diwali play. Here is how the formats compare, with the numbers.
4 min read
Air India’s Diwali film has about 5.5 million views, AirAsia paired a music video with a seven-day fare sale, Cleartrip published its own booking data, and ITC Hotels sold the festival as mithai and hampers. Malaysia Airlines ran a film on the same theme of going home. View counts are as of 8 November 2026.
Air India: the film that sells no seat
Air India posted its Diwali film this month on the official Air India channel. It has about 5.5 million views as of 8 November 2026, and no press coverage was found. The format is the purest of the five. The brand sells the feeling of home and leaves the booking to the viewer.
AirAsia: music video, fare sale and an on-route event
AirAsia ran the most layered Deepavali campaign. Varnam Malaysia reported that the special fares could be booked from 26 October to 1 November 2026 through the AirAsia MOVE app or airasia.com. Destinations included Ahmedabad, Amritsar and Trivandrum, alongside Langkawi, Bali, the Maldives, Seoul and Melbourne.
The offer carried a one-time change fee waiver, although fare differences may still apply. It also gave up to 30% off the Value Pack when bought in the MOVE app at the first booking, which ties the sale to the app as well as the fare.
The music video features Mugen Rao, whom AirAsia describes as a Malaysian Indian singer and Tamil film actor. The official AirAsia upload has about 3.19 million views and Mugen Rao’s own channel about 244,000. No sales numbers have been published.
On 5 November 2026 the campaign moved to the airport. AirAsia’s newsroom reported that guests on flight AK 13 from KLIA Terminal 2 to Chennai received goodie bags of AirAsia merchandise and AirAsia MOVE hotel discount vouchers. Mugen Rao and Kesavan Sivanandam, Deputy Group Chief Operations Officer of AirAsia Group, handed them out. An inflight lucky draw gave three winners AirAsia MOVE cash vouchers worth RM250 each and Monotheme perfume.
Malaysia Airlines: Beyond The Light, a film with no fares
Malaysia Airlines launched Beyond The Light on 29 October 2026, and it has about 175,600 views as of 8 November. A son makes his mother something made entirely for her. It shows no fares, no aircraft shots and no sale, and it closes a festive film series that ran from Hari Raya to Deepavali. Like Air India’s film, it is a brand play with no price attached.
Cleartrip: certainty, backed by its own data
Cleartrip took the data route. Its Gulf arm ran a short film, This Diwali, Fly Home for Less, offering up to AED 150 off for the diaspora flying home (about 80,000 views). Pallavi Saxena, Cleartrip’s Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, told Adgully that hotel bookings grew 135% for Diwali and 66% for Navratri so far. Udaipur was up 316%, Bengaluru 189% and Jaipur 174%.
Watch Cleartrip’s This Diwali, Fly Home for Less on YouTube
The Cleartrip PeekABoo Travel Trends Tracker, reported by Travel Trends Today, added more. Flight bookings by 15 to 24 year olds rose 60%, against 6% for 25 to 34 year olds. Budget hotel bookings rose 201% and luxury 162%. Among international flights, Taipei was up 146%, Cebu 117% and Dublin 110%. India Today carried the same figures on 29 October 2026, including leisure hotel bookings up 135% for Diwali and Udaipur up 316%, so one data release reached both trade and mainstream readers.
ITC Hotels: the festival as mithai and hampers
ITC Hotels sold no stay. Ritvah, its Diwali Festive Curation, offers handcrafted mithai, gourmet treats, artisanal desserts and hampers, as Telangana Today reported. The Signature Mithai Box of 24 costs Rs 2,399. Hampers run from The Festive Reserve at Rs 3,299 to The Legacy Collection at Rs 23,999. Orders are pre-order only, with pickup at ITC Kohenur, Hyderabad.
The ladder runs from about Rs 2,400 to nearly Rs 24,000, so one programme serves a casual gifter and a corporate buyer. Pre-order also gives the hotel a demand count before the kitchen starts.
How the formats differ
The brand film builds affinity and measures it in views. The music video with a sale ties emotion to a dated booking window, then extends into a physical event that produces its own content. The data release sells reassurance, since rising bookings tell a hesitant buyer that others have already committed. The hamper sells the brand at a price point far below a room night. For hotel, airline and OTA marketers, the common thread is that none of the five rests on discounting alone.
Key takeaway
Festival campaigns work best when each format has a job. A film builds the feeling of home, a fare sale with a short window converts it, and a brand’s own booking data gives hesitant buyers a reason to act now. Hotels without a flight to sell can follow ITC: a pre-order gift line is cheap to test and shows demand before it costs anything. Publish the numbers you can, because only film views are public here and nobody has shared sales results.
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Daksh Sharma
Chief Editor, TravHQ
Daksh Sharma is a travel tech enthusiast and a prolific voice in the B2B travel industry. A speaker at numerous travel-tech events, he is at the forefront of digital and AI adoption in travel. He conducts AI training and implementation programmes and works as a digital advisor to a number of global B2B brands.
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