Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Booking.com, the online travel platform has explained that India has come up as its one of the fastest growing markets for alternative accommodations, which excludes hotels, resorts, etc. The Amsterdam-based company has over 880,000 listings in India, of which 140,000 are in ‘alternative accommodation’ – comprising homestays, apartments, villas, bed-and-breakfast, cabins, boats, and treehouses, etc. – among its 23 categories. Travel hubs like Kerala, Karnataka, and Goa have the greatest number of properties in this sector.
Booking.com today offers over 5.8 million listings in homes, apartments and other unique places to stay globally. Our investments in this space have resulted in an alternative accommodation business with meaningful size and scale that recorded $2.8 billion in revenue in 2018, representing approximately 20% of the company’s (Booking Holdings) overall revenue for the year. It also reached the important milestone of over $1 billion in revenues in Q3 2018 alone.
40 percent of Booking.com’s active customer base has booked an alternative accommodation property in the past 12 months.
Pepijn Rivers, Senior Vice-President and Head of Accommodation at Booking.com, at the time of speaking to Indian media delegates in Amsterdam, stated that 2017-18 experienced a 68 percent rise in supply from India. As per him, the growth of disposable income among the Indian middle class is altering the attitude towards travel itself. Also, he disclosed the facets about Booking.com’s India experience in the last one year, which writes testimony to his observation. (We have around 100 people employed in India and around 2000 in Asia-Pacific.)
According to the findings of Booking.com, the most-visited cities by Indian travelers going abroad are Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore, London, and Kuala Lumpur. However, 58 percent of Indian travelers favor staycations (domestic travel/holiday experience with limited transit time), whereas globally it is 46 percent.
The best Indian cities visited by travelers in 2018 include New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, the data showed. As per Booking.com’s statistics, the highest numbers of travelers to India are from the countries like the UK, France, the US, Germany, and the UAE. It says New Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Chennai, and Bengaluru are the most popular cities in India among global travelers.
Tags: booking.com
