A Cleartrip Insight into How India Travels through Mobile

Here’s presenting our Quarterly Mobile Insight (for Q2 2014). It has become a habit for the Mobile channel to surprise us on growth.

It was the best ever quarter for us (on all counts – traffic, transactions & revenue), and it grew 67% QoQ (Q2 14 vs Q1 14) on searches, while transactions grew 168% YoY and 69% QoQ (vs Q1 14). On an absolute basis, mobile stands at 43% of overall traffic and 30% at a transaction level.

With a goal to make travel simple for our customers, we made several upgrades to the Cleartrip mobile app in the last few months.

The first to be noted was the addition of in-app cancellations & amendments—this was one of the most requested features when it came to our portfolio of mobile products & while this feature is useful for flight & hotel bookings, it is especially so for trains, where the cancellation penalty is low, and availability is restricted.

The second major upgrade for us was the launch of the universal iPad app—which enabled sharing all core functionality between the iPhone & iPad apps & with a customized user experience for each screen size; with a larger iPad screen, the universal app took the Cleartrip experience on iOS to a whole new level.

Lastly, we are back on Windows Phone with a huge update, including a brand new panorama screen, international flights & effortless payments with Expressway 1-touch bookings.

Hotels as a category continued to grow the most on the mobile channel, with almost 92% increase in transactions QoQ. Even better was the mobile conversion rate for hotels, which was almost similar to the desktop conversion rate within, 9-months of launch of hotels on the Cleartrip app. This increase in conversion was also fuelled by the usage of mobile as a main-stream option for future travel (and not only last minute travel).

Tablet traffic grew by 21% along with the adoption of the iPad app. The user behavior data threw a few surprises, especially between iOS and Android users:

• iOS users indicated more preference for convenience with higher utilization of pay@hotel, “hotels near me” feature as well as 4*/5* filters
• While Android users in contrast used more utility functions like price & location
• Also, worth noting was the homogeneous nature of the usage of photos in the app with almost 50% using it to research

Samsung & Apple continued to claim the biggest portion of mobile traffic. While the share of traffic growth was relatively flat for Apple in Q2’14 (vs. Q1’14), Samsung did gain 1%pt absolute share of traffic in the same time-frame while Sony & Motorola also grew a share point of traffic each with their respective new device launches. (Moto E, Moto G and Sony Experia M bolstered the traffic growth for these companies).

On the OS front, Android grew 9%pt share, while iOS declined in traffic share (though the iOS absolute numbers were flat).

• iOS 7 was the most used iOS version in Q2’14 but with the launch of iOS 8 the migration has been notably fast (as of Oct 9th, already 44% of daily traffic is coming from iOS 8+).
• Within the Android OS, KitKat continued its increase to 27 % of share of traffic.

Mobile web traffic is still not insignificant (~46%), with Chrome being the most used browser, followed by Android browser & Safari.

We are very optimistic on the continued mobile growth opportunity in India, and excited on the road ahead for Cleartrip leading from the front.