A look at Indian B2C travel eCommerce space from customer perspective

With travel accounting for around 70% of the overall Indian eCommerce market; the MakeMyTrip and Ibibo merger, will go down history as a very significant event.

The joint entity with a combined ownership over popular digital assets like MakeMyTrip, GiIbibo, RedBus, is going to turn into an Indian travel behemoth. With these traditional assets, they have ventured into new space with

·         RightStay – ventured into the AirBnB territory of Homestay market

·         Ryde – ventured into intercity carpooling solution.

At this juncture it might be pertinent to take a looks at the B2C stats, based on the publicly available digital footprint left by the members of the new entity and their immediate competitors.

The source for all of these data is credited below in the Source section. This data should be treated as more of a trend information, as absolute accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

Let’s first look at the traffic trends:

	Visits (in millions)	Global Rank	Country Rank
MakeMyTrip.com	24.2	1498	60
Goibibo.com	5.9	4169	137
Redbus.in	7	5687	193
Cleartrip.com	8.5	4406	168
Yatra.com	7	6278	239
Expedia.co.in	1.3	33053	1561

Source: https://www.similarweb.com/

The traffic of the new entity might account for up to around 65 to 70% of the overall B2C Travel eCommerce space.

  

Next, let us take a look at the User Engagement metrics of the existing assets:

	Time On Site (mins)	Pages per Visit (no)	Bounce Rate (%)
MakeMyTrip.com	5.52	4.77	32.73
Goibibo.com	7.02	6.44	26.14
Redbus.in	5.25	4.83	28.91
Cleartrip.com	4.37	5.06	39.36
Yatra.com	5.21	3.78	38.42
Expedia.co.in	6.56	3.50	42.45

 Source: https://www.similarweb.com/

The data shows that the new entity will have the best in class assets from user engagement perspective – which will give them the leverage to look at adding cutting edge features to existing products or venture into new spaces, as they have already done with RightStay and Ryde.

 Looking at the performance and cross channel user experience aspect:

Disclaimer: Response Time displayed below are indicative only – arrived at using https://tools.pingdom.com, from a client based in Dallas, Texas, USA. These figures might additionally be influenced by the network conditions on the day it was measured.

	Response Time (secs)	PageSpeed Score (Mobile)	PageSpeed Score (Desktop)
MakeMyTrip.com	2.779	65	82
Goibibo.com	3.507	47	74
Redbus.in	2.65	63	75
Cleartrip.com	2.799	63	72
Yatra.com	2.213	53	67
Expedia.co.in	2.117	52	73

Source: https://tools.pingdom.com for Response Time and Google PageSpeed

On the performance aspect GoIbibo seems to have some issue. The question remains whether GoIbibo.com will continue as a separate asset – seems quite unlikely.

Let’s drop ‘e’ and enable commerce by all digitally enabled means.

https://in.linkedin.com/in/pranabkd