With airfares rising sharply by more than 40% in many domestic routes owing to demand-supply mismatch, online travel portal ixigo said it has seen many passengers taking a train or a bus rides to escape high airfares.
“The recent air-fare hike due to rising oil prices has driven customers towards trains and buses, which have shown phenomenal growth,” Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO & Co-founder,said.
For road travel time of 5 to 6 hours, a lot of people are preferring a bus ride rather than taking an expensive flight and for longer distances, people, who have time with them are opting for a train journey, he said.
With the increase in bookings, railway ticket bookings have surpassed pre-COVID levels, with almost 25 lakh people buying reserved tickets every day. The Vande Bharat train service will accelerate train travel growth, he opined.
Mr Bajpai the overall travel market would have positive growth momentum starting August 2022 due to utility-driven travel, pent-up demand translating into monsoon travel; and early advent of festivals in calendar year 22.
“The current economic crisis in Sri Lanka can also sway travellers to look at other preferred tourist destinations like India, possibly boosting inbound travel this year,” he added.
According to him the entry of new airlines would stimulate demand in the post the pandemic time.
On the current air travel market he said, “India’s airline market bounced back in Q1FY23 but our data analysis shows that the number of air travellers were still around a 3.65 lakh per day level – less than the pre-pandemic figure of around 4.1 lakh.”
ixigo, he said, is leveraging technology by increasing automation to enhance the post booking experience of customers and address their queries. Its AI-driven personalised travel assistant ‘TARA’ is now addressing over 84% of queries and initiating several automated processes. QR based ticketing, UPI integration and tracking buses are minimising revenue leakage.
“We unveiled innovative products such as ixigo assured, our free cancellation offering at a nominal charge that gives full fare refund to customers without asking any questions,” Mr. Bajpai said adding this facility has helped in bagging more customers.
The online travel-tech company said it had navigated the pandemic with 3.4 times growth in revenues as compared to the pre-pandemic times.
Its revenue grew to ₹379.58 crore in FY22 (up 184% from ₹135.57 crore in FY21) from ₹112.96 crore in FY20 (as per FY22 annual report published on their website).
It continued to remain adjusted EBITDA positive, with an adjusted EBITDA of ₹6.2 crore in FY22.
“We had been able to scale our user-base, monetisation, and revenue rapidly in FY22, as we continued to retain the nimbleness and agility to react rapidly to the changing business environment due to the impact of pandemic. Tier 2, 3 & 4 travellers have been resilient and given us the strength to keep growing despite a challenging year with two waves of COVID.” he added.
