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Sharat Dhall
Managing Director, TripAdvisor, India
In hindsight, I would say that we met a need. There was a gap in the market. In a situation where you are careful about each rupee that you spend, you could end up doing more research than you would have done a year ago.
So a travel planning and research site, which is what we are, did really well. We did not get impacted by recession. Worldwide too we had an excellent year – we grew in double digits last year when most companies in the travel space tumbled. Our EU business has grown tremendously in the last three years.
It’s not that people stopped travelling in 2009. They scaled down their travel. A lot more people chose domestic destinations over international ones so they still needed to at which hotels they needed.
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Last year one piece of data in all our forum discussions was that the use of words related to budget travel – discount, value, deals – had gone up by 100%. That is the one thing that has changed this year. We are seeing much less of that.”
PR Srinivas
Industry Lead, Tourism, Hospitality & Leisure, Deloitte India
“There is 70% increase in outbound. From the inbound perspective we’re getting to summer and it’s going to go bad until October lull into inbound. That is usual for us.
Looking at source markets – they are not fully back into holiday mode. India continues to be expensive. The new traveller is business-oriented rather than leisure-oriented. Delhi and Mumbai both airports will be ready which will cater to increase in numbers.
Infrastructure and tourists is a chicken-and-egg situation. As far as hotels go, the land prices are high, so hotels could not start at less than five star prices. If you encourage mid-market travel to India it has to be catered by mid-market hotels.
People have gone lean. You did not have time to react and plan your expansion in the boom years. You went and recruited because you had to get those properties working and services operational. Hotels, airlines, cafes – the entire value chain was like that. I think companies will be retaining the same level of staff in back office procedures, procurements.
Cost cutting has become important. We work with one of the largest branded restaurant chains. We worked on a lean procurement system and on how to manage costs and bring down overall cost issues in the run.
Stuff like wastage, procurement of raw materials in time, standard industrial stuff adapted to the hospitality space – things like CRM or how would you train staff to be multi-tasking. There are always better ways of using technology, of ensuring waste management.
We do time and motion studies. It had all gone into thin air when there were jobs and there were people to offer them to. The trigger for all these has to be something that hurts the bottom line. That happened last year.
The market is aiming to please the mid-market. If you do expectation management and the gap is well-set, service level is defined, expectation is not built up. We are not going to promise the earth to the consumer – to start with.
The high-end traveller from abroad is not necessarily coming to India. There are better page3 locations that they can go to. If I am in UK, I can go to Brazil rather than come to India or Argentina, unless you are doing an upper upscale kind of crowd.”
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