Festive travel in India: Festivals are a major part of the culture in India, especially due to the vast diversity and the number of festivals we have. Naturally, this means that people often travel to celebrate these festivals, be it to their hometowns or to other places to celebrate with a vacation. But this year, much like 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has made travel more difficult. However, with India seemingly at the tail end of the second wave of the pandemic, it seems that travel is picking up as the festive season approaches us.
An uptick in bookings
The transportation and accommodation sectors have seen an uptick in bookings, as per several aggregators.
“The Market has really been showing positive trends for both Air Ticketing and Hotels business. We are witnessing a constant surge month on month in our travel bookings. We could see a 10%~15% surge in flight passengers in Q4 as compared with Q3, especially for last year, the ratio came to 113% post the first lockdown. Hotels see almost 75 – 85% bookings happening about three days prior to travel, but for flights, bookings mostly happen well in advance. We do see some green shoots for hotel bookings for the festival dates but the proportion is still miniscule, but yes demand is slowly and gradually picking up. We have currently started seeing 50% higher than average bookings for flights for festive season through our platform, which is very exciting as it is a very positive trend for the entire travel industry as it depicts that with the ease in lockdown guidelines and decreasing number of COVID cases, people are now looking forward to travel during festivals,” HappyEasyGo Founder and CEO Boris Zha told Financial Express Online.
SanKash Founder Akash Dahiya said, “With festive season in sight, we are seeing 70% increase in queries and almost 50% increase in bookings.”
Similar was also the observation by Confirmtkt Co-Founder and CEO Dinesh Kumar Kotha, who said, “We are observing a sudden spike of demand for particular dates of the festival, for trains we are observing waitlists touching peak numbers on several routes.”
“Demand for festive travel has seen encouraging growth in all three segments- flights, trains and buses (MoM as well as YoY). Bookings for some popular routes (on ixigo apps and website) towards the end of August 2021 for festive travel have seen an average MoM increase of 45% for trains, 71% for buses and 20% for flights,” said Rajnish Kumar, Co-founder, Non-executive Director & Group CPTO, ixigo.
Read More at https://www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/travel-tourism/india-back-in-holiday-mood-how-festive-travel-workation-have-sparked-new-surge-in-domestic-tourism/2323773/
Commenti