Monday, September 15, 2014

Air travellers take to mobile apps to get best out of flash sales

Mumbai: Air travellers are increasingly shifting to mobile applications from the desktop to book tickets, a trend that underlines the growing demand for smartphones and mobile Internet and, interestingly, is driven by the growing number of flash sales offered by airlines.

"Right now, there are 8,500 to 10,000 tickets sold via mobile applications every day. Two years back, the number was zero," said Samyukth Sridharan, president and chief operating officer of Cleartrip. "This shows the increasing number of customers who have access to the Internet via mobiles. It also in a way shows we are getting tech-savvy and that there is a growing faith on the powers of the Internet. Compare this to a few years earlier when our biggest worry was doing credit card transactions. Cleartrip gets 30 per cent of its total searches on its mobile while the rest comes from desktop. Last year, the ratio was 12: 88.

Similarly, actual transactions on mobile have risen to 35 per cent from 20 per cent last year. Cleartrip gets 3 million searches every month, or 100,000 a day. As of last week, roughly 2.2 million consumers had downloaded its mobile application. For others, the story is similar. Makemytrip, India's biggest online portal, said in its latest annual report that its mobile customers soared more than 14 times in two years to 327,892 till March 2014. It had a total of 3.2 million users of its mobile application as of end June.
5/09/14 Anirban Chowdhury/Economic Times
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