Most online travel markets are obsessed with flights, hotels and online travel agencies, but in India, rail towers above all else. Online traffic to rail websites exceeds that to all other travel categories, according to a recent PhoCusWright report. In fact, as the online rail market matures, the product may also be providing a boost to India’s local online travel agencies.
PhoCusWright’s Indian Online Travel Traffic Report, created in partnership with global digital intelligence provider comScore, tracks the growth of India’s online travel population. More than half of all unique visitors to India’s online travel category visited a ground transportation website in 4Q10, making it the largest online travel traffic category. Eight of the 10 most-trafficked ground transportation websites are focused on rail.
The website of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC), part of the government-owned Indian Railways, ranks as the largest travel website in Asia Pacific in terms of transactions. Yet, as the only transactional rail website in India (all other rail websites refer back to IRCTC for booking), the site has struggled with stability issues. While IRCTC reports that some 25% of transactions still fail at the payment gateway, site performance is improving, and the release of IRCTC’s rail shopping and booking API has empowered online intermediaries to offer a superior rail shopping experience.
Traffic gains among India’s top three OTAs, all of which are local players, may be due in part to their growing popularity among rail bookers. MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Cleartrip all added rail to their product mix by mid-2009 via the IRCTC API. While rail may not contribute significantly to intermediary revenue, it plays an important strategic role: the significant volume of rail shoppers may return subsequently to book other, more lucrative travel products.
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