India: This study was conducted basis ALL the Hotel bookings made on Cleartrip (Desktop and Mobile and Tablet) in the period from October – December 2014.

Considering Cleartrip sells over 2,500 hotel bookings each day, this data has been taken from the sale of 2500×90 days worth of data. These stats were arrived by studying, dissecting, analysing and classifying this data into information sects like the ones in the infographic, to arrive at trends in Hotel Buying Behaviour, online, amongst Indians.

Amit Taneja – Cleartrip’s Chief Revenue Officer, said, “2014 was a great year for travel – customers were presented with a more customised range of products & offers to plan holidays. And the response was phenomenal, as visible in a 165% growth (YoY, Q3’14 vs Q3’13) in traffic, and 100% growth in transaction volumes. The growth was uniform across destinations and all categories of hotels, though there was a visible trend towards more short, weekend breaks.

Hotel room-rates in this quarter went up on average by 5% underlining the high demand in this quarter. The average room rate in Metros saw more than 10% growth due to higher business, as well as leisure traffic.

This festive quarter (Q3’14) also had two long-weekends – Gandhi Jayanti & Christmas, and both these saw a 500% growth in check-ins, compared to a normal day.  Goa, Mysore & Jaipur led the pack in bookings for these weekends.  Interestingly, the travel behaviour was different when it came to New Year’s Eve, where the metros took the lead by a huge margin.”

Taneja added, “To solve the weekend getaway travellers’ decision-making problem, we also launched Weekend Getaways on Cleartrip’s iOS and Android apps, to help customers plan their breaks, on the go.

Early data from the usage of Weekend Getaways suggests another interesting observation – although Mumbai has a much higher proportion of destinations in the vicinity of the city, destinations around Delhi & Bangalore contributed to more than double the transactions, as compared to destinations around Mumbai.

Q3’14 also marked the 1-year anniversary of the launch of ‘Hotels’ on Cleartrip Mobile. In the last one year, the Mobile channel has accounted for more than a third of the Hotel traffic.

Mobile (bookings), while initially were biased towards Last Minute, are now being used even for Advance Bookings – almost a third of our Hotel bookings on Mobile are 15-days out. We have also seen a higher preference to book 4*/5* hotels on Mobile, as compared to its Desktop counterpart.

As economic activity picks up in the coming quarter, along with the better-than-ever consumer sentiment, we are confident that the growth in the Accommodations segment is likely to sustain for the next many quarters, and the channel shift of consumers from booking accommodation, from traditional offline channels to online and mobile channels, will accelerate further in the coming quarters.”

source : Lokesh Shastri