London Stock Exchange-listed tourism company TUI has set its sight on the fast expanding Indian online travel market. It recently shut its business of distributing holiday packages and launched an online platform in early May for hotel and flight bookings and to compete with players such as MakeMyTrip and Yatra.

Having identified India, China and Brazil as future markets to gain significant share in the growing online travel bookings space, TUI Group has devised the ‘TUI 2022’ strategy. As part of this exercise, the Group’s subsidiary TUI India has been transformed to a digital provider exclusively focusing on the online business. Its website www.tui.in now allows Indian consumers to combine flight and hotel offerings within seconds. The change in approach is underpinned by the appointment of Krishan Singh as CEO of TUI India. Krishan joins TUI India from Yatra.com where he served as Senior Vice President.

With its TUI 2022 programme, the Group will achieve a fully digital market entry based on standardised, globally scalable and uniform software architecture in India, China and Brazil. By 2022, TUI Group aims to win additional turnover of EUR 1 billion and 1 million additional customers from these future markets.

TUI launched its classical tour operating business in India in 2005. The business has now been realigned to reflect India’s rapidly expanding Internet usage and significant growth of online travel bookings. In 2017 alone, revenue in the online travel booking market in India climbed by more than 30% year-on-year to USD 22.5 billion.

Alexander Linden, Director Future Markets, TUI Group, “India is one of our future markets to deliver additional growth for the TUI Group. Realigning the local business with a strong digital focus under our TUI brand offers enormous opportunities. I am happy to have Krishan and his team onboard, they will ensure business expansion and deliver future growth.”

The Indian online travel market has been seeing a rapid growth led by steep discounts and offers from market leaders such as MakeMyTrip and Yatra. While nobody else is making much money in the space, TUI is clear that it wants to have a sustainable and profitable Indian journey.

Besides selling hotels and flights, TUI will also focus on growing the flights-plus-hotels segment to short-haul destinations such as Singapore, Dubai and Mauritius.

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The entire tavel industry has rapidly adapted to online presence with the boom of smartphones in the present day scenario. Hundreds of online bookings and organic travel content with respect to the sector has given research data analysts and decision makers, a front row observation seat to fully summarize what it thinks of the state of affairs be like. In such an effort to make the trends more comprehendible, Criteo and PhocusWright came together to talk about the online travel market especially of the Indian subcontinent.

Criteo had invited over Phocuswright to share latest data and trends in online travel that revolved around the consumption of online content by Indian audiences and how their behaviour would further affect the current and the future trends in the travel and hospitality sector. The extensive usage of mobile platform to book millions of services has made it look like a luxury on tips for the service providers or the consumers. These are the key observations based on the September publication of Criteo leverage the mobile opportunity with respect to the coming summer season of travel.

A market overview

The total travel market of India for 2016 is estimated at $28 billion with around 10.36% of online penetration. It is expected to grow by 2020 reaching around 41% of online penetration. According to the Criteo report, smartphone bookings are expected to rise with the last-minute bookings topping the chart of online devices and state of art mobile apps generating majority of online bookings.

OTA is the ringmaster

OTAs have positioned themselves as a priority player when it comes to searching and comparing. They are best suited to capture the largest share of hotel bookings. The smartphones are the game changers especially for OTAs. The air sector has made a point to put its inventory on the OTAs as two-thirds of air ticketing happens there and one-third direct.

Although the medium businesses and smaller properties are still lagging behind in connection, budget hotel brands like OYO rooms, Fab Hotels, Treebo are focusing on bringing service consistency and online enablement of budget hotel properties with smaller room size.

Slower mobile penetration

The rate at which the Indian market is engaging mobile content is slow. Its not strong as it should be. That’s because the providers are still unable to cater to a seamless mobile experience despite the market is ready. The mobile booking penetration for 2016 is at 22% with a strong market for mobile app usage up to 40%. This indicates that there are strong players in app distribution front.

Payment still crawls at a toise speed as cash remains as a dominant method of transactions. Other transit platforms like Ola and Uber are creating a wave of caprice which would further boost the mobile booking share in travel in years to come.

The conclusions that could be drawn from this report are:
1-India is predominantly an Android market.

2-App bookings are on the rise.

3-A fully optimized mobile platform is a must- have.

The Criteo Travel Flash report could be found here.

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Travel Triangle and WeAreHolidays are two startups that have recently caught everyone’s attention in the online travel marketplace segment in a very big way. While Noida based Travel Triangle raised $8 million funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners last month, Gurgaon based WeAreHolidays had raised Series A founding round in the range of $3-$6 million last year.

Both platforms are helping Indian travellers to plan their trips by providing them tailored tour packages for destinations of their choice from listed travel agents. So if you want a custom package from Delhi to Mauritius and want to find competitive quotes from a bunch of travel agents, these are just the services that would assist you.

Let’s look at how these two travel-planning services stack up against each other and who the real winner is?

Comparison 1: The Device Test

From the looks of it, the websites for both of these platforms have been designed and built for the desktop world. Though the websites are fully responsive keeping in mind the needs of the mobile traveller, we didn’t find links to their apps on the mobile version (None of the websites pointed us to Android/iOS apps).

The Travel Triangle website looks good on mobile but we have been served with wrong version at times

On the mobile platform, WeAreHolidays ranks a little better in terms of overall look-and-feel. Its appearance is the same on both desktop & mobile device, providing a smoother transition for the user.

WeAreHolidays has got similar website for desktop & mobile

On the other hand, it does appear that the technology team at Travel Triangle has put in specific thought towards rendering of their website on the mobile device. On loading, you can see two different versions for both Desktop & Mobile.

Earlier there was some discrepancy in the content on both devices. While the desktop version claimed that Travel Triangle has 650+ expert travel agents on board (scroll down and it was 450+), the mobile site claimed to have 450+ expert agents. In addition, the text formatting on the mobile device could have been a little cleaner.

The TravelTriangle website we found the first time

The Travel Triangle website we found the second time

Later when we tried visiting the website on another desktop computer, we were greeted by a different website which was similar to the mobile version. What added to the surprise was the fact that at times, even the mobile website looked different on different devices. Not sure if they are serving different versions to different devices and browsers or it is some technical glitch on their end.

Winner Verdict (Device Test): WeAreHolidays

Comparison 2: Traffic Comparison

So who garners the traffic juice among the two?

We have used similarweb.com to find the estimated monthly traffic for the two websites. No points in guessing, who wins the round of traffic!

Travel Triangle gets around 380k visits

WeAreHolidays gets less traffic but more page views per visitor

With estimated monthly visits pegged at 380k, Travel Triangle does beat WeAreHolidays by quite a handsome margin that has 20k estimated visits for the ‘.co.in’ and 80k for ‘.com’. When combined, the total traffic comes at 100k i.e. about 26% of the total traffic of Travel Triangle.

Winner Verdict (Traffic): Travel Triangle

Comparison 3: UI & Design

The websites that really inspire smart travellers these days are the ones that are device agnostic and provide an intuitive interaction experience. On this front, the overall design of both is very smooth and we must admit that there is very little to choose between the two.

Travel Triangle

On the homepage, Travel Triangle presents you with the option of selecting a destination and lists down some popular destinations if you scroll down. The page looks neat and we loved the character illustrations used by Travel Triangle instead of real people. They have also used simple icons to highlight some of the key site features.

WeAreHolidays

WeAreHolidays presents you with the destination search option like Travel Triangle when you visit the website but scroll down and you will find a lot more than just tour packages. You will find articles about travel, travelogues, featured sellers and recently booked itineraries among other items. This might make the home look a bit cluttered but could motivate people to browse around among articles and travelogues.

Winner Verdict (UI & Design): Tie, Travel Triangle has got a neat design but WeAreHolidays manages to earn more page views per visitor with its design.

Comparison 4: Depth of Content

The common problem with most of the recent startups is the lack of adequate content to provide user stickiness and decrease bounce rate. So let’s find out whether these two portals have the content to keep you hooked.

Travel Triangle

We did a quick search for 3-day tour packages to Singapore in the budget range of 43,000 – 76,000 INR. To our surprise, we didn’t find any tour package in the search results. We tweaked the filters a little bit and increased our budget range and number of days, but the result was still the same. Even if there are no packages to show for the selected filters, they can at least show some other packages along with the message keeping one of the filters like price or days flexible.

(Update- On browsing through Travel Triangle again after a gap of few days, we found that they have changed this and now serve you the option of browsing packages in different budget or different duration in case your search doesn’t yield any results.)

They have a blog which is updated regularly and features some interesting posts but it is not very visible on the website. Making the blog more visible could help them keep the users engaged and use the posts for creating the urge to travel.

WeAreHolidays

WeAreHolidays seems to be slightly better when it comes to engaging content. The searches are simple and the search results contain a lot more than just travel itineraries. Of course, the travel itineraries are a top priority because that is what they are selling so they sit on the top in the results but along with that you will find various travelogues and articles. This helps in engaging the visitors and motivate them to spend more time on the website. The frequency of posting isn’t as high as Travel Triangle, but presentation earns them some points here.

Winner Verdict (Depth of Content): WeAreHolidays

Comparison 5: Navigation & Experience

Now that Travel Triangle didn’t like the idea of a trip to Singapore, we decided to browse our options for Kerala on both the websites.

Travel Triangle

Travel Triangle used to ask multiple questions (around 5-6) before you see any itineraries (and like it happened in case of Singapore, there are chances that you won’t see any results at the end of it). Now however they have made some changes. They will still ask you questions, but not many and they are all presented on the homepage itself. This considerably improves the navigation experience. There are multiple filters so that the visitor can easily kill the options that are irrelevant to him/her.

WeAreHolidays

WeAreHolidays has got a simple search box where you enter the destination and see results that include itineraries, travelogues and articles. Now the articles and travelogues are all good but their primary objective of getting traffic is to get bookings and they have left some gaps here. There are no filters to be seen here for narrowing down among the presented options (or they are not visible enough) and it is hard to spot the desired ones in a sea of options. It isn’t exactly very clear what factor they are using to decide the order of listings either. From what we can see, it isn’t according to the price, duration, cost, cost per day or ratings. The least they can do is add the option to sort the results.

There is no option to sort or filter the options on WeAreHolidays

Winner verdict (Navigation & Experience): TravelTriangle

Overall Verdict

Travel Triangle gets more traffic, but WeAreHolidays manages to retain the visitors for longer, Travel Triangle has got a neat UI while WeAreHolidays offers more content. The point is that both the websites are good at something or the other, but neither one of them takes the cake. Both the websites need to iron out some major issues before we recommend one of them wholeheartedly. Until then, we think WeAreHolidays will do a better job of providing you with travel inspiration and finding you a travel agent.

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