Cool Social Media Features by Indian Travel Websites

The ‘travel’ category has been one of the earliest to adopt internet in general and even in countries where e-commerce penetration is low, online ticket purchases has remained popular. It’s no surprise then that the key participants in this process – the fliers, are vocal about their experiences and social media provides an easy channel to consume and generate content.

Some of the most popular online travel agents (OTA) in India have been Yatra, Makemytrip and Cleartrip with Expedia joining the party in 2008. India has an estimated 120 million online users (Internet World Stats) or roughly 10% of the population. In terms of unique visitors to websites, the above four OTAs attracted 11.3 million unique visitors in total with ComScore noting that 29% of people visited two or more websites.

Among the social channels adopted by these websites, Facebook seems to be the most popular (surprise) with all four pages gaining a few hundred thousand fans.

• Cleartrip – 2,76,351 fans
• Makemytrip – 3,64,172 fans
• Yatra – 3,27,435 fans
• Expedia – 166,220 fans

Besides engaging with fans through a mix of trivia, polls, pictures and offers, Indian travel websites are seeking to integrate social into the overall buying experience. Two good examples of it are:

1. Facebook Connect option at Cleartrip

The website recently launched the opt-in feature for registered users where they could get to share their travel plans with Facebook friends. By authorizing the app, information such as name, age, gender and current city can be shared with travel and hotel partners. The key feature of the app remains the generation of an automatic post which looks something like this:

 

Once friends come to know about it through the news feed, it becomes a good venue to share experiences and provide tips. The app also tries to be discreet by sharing limited information such as the destination and date only.

2. Natural language flight search tool at iXiGo

The website works as a travel search engine by displaying real-time information gathered from other travel websites (OTA). Over time, the site claims to make searches more relevant by knowing preferences of users.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case you’re wondering about the revenue model, the website acts as an affiliate and gets a percentage commission for every successful sale made by following the link on iXiGo. Sponsored links in search results serve as the second revenue stream.

On iXiGo’s Facebook and Twitter channels, a query with natural text such as “BOM to DEL, tomorrow” can be processed by the search engine in the form of a reply containing details about the cheapest offer and a link to the search result.

While it’s super convenient, users are likely to judge the service by its speed and level of sophistication in understanding the query. A test post by me on iXiGo Search Facebook page resulted in a reply within a minute. However, a tweet to @iXiGoSearch remained unanswered after 90 minutes.

Would you value these additional services by a provider? What else would you expect to make your trip more social?

Please share your thoughts below.

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