In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18, Laura Houldsworth, managing director (MD) and vice president (VP), Asia Pacific (APAC), Booking.com said that the whole world is looking at the Indian traveller and Booking.com is no exception. “With the largest world’s largest population, certainly the fastest rising middle class, we know that the market is going to grow from $115 million in 2019 to $410 billion in 2030. So there’s a huge opportunity for everybody in the travel space to capture this demand and make sure that we’re meeting travellers where they need us the most. So for us, certainly at Booking.com and across the booking brands, we continue to invest in the domestic travel.”
She says the company is expanding the types of accommodation that travellers are looking for. “This tends to be beyond the metro cities now. So we’re looking at tier 2-3 cities. We are also looking at locations such as Varanasi, Kochi, Mysore for the religious and spiritual travel. And I talked about the kind of wedding tourism and we know that that is also taking place in the smaller regions. It is bringing a lot of opportunities to growth and jobs.”
Houldsworth says there are teams on the ground, all across India to ensure that they are providing the right types of accommodation. “We have got about 14 different types of properties now listed. We have put in additional language support. We launched Hindi last year and the other investment that we have made into this very critical market is our ‘Center of Excellence’, which supports all of the Booking Holding brands.”
In fact, Booking Holding’s Centre of Excellence was inaugurated in Bengaluru towards the end of last year. It is an investment of 250M USD made over five years and comes with the promise of 1,000 jobs to be created in Bengaluru. It will work as a hub for all of the Booking Holdings brands, including Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK and OpenTable.
She is excited to see what this investment can bring. “We know the talent is very strong here in India and so we continue to invest.”
When it comes to marketing strategy for India, Booking.com has been the official accommodation partner for all the ICC events and had also roped in cricketer Rohit Sharma as an ambassador for last year’s World Cup campaign.
“We really wanted to work closely with who’s relevant here in the market and we will continue to look for what’s next for us going forward for this market.”
Over all, Houldsworth also remains extremely optimistic about the travel industry in 2024. “We have seen that travel remains incredibly resilient, which is good for all of us in the industry. We are seeing that worldwide, across Asia Pacific and increasingly so across India. We have seen record numbers for the last two years when we think there was initial sense of revenge travel in 2022, we saw globally 900 million room nights booked. Last year, we saw over a billion. And we expect to continue to see a rise of that this year. Even in the start of the year, we are seeing that travel bookings that we have got already for the rest of the year are significantly higher than they were this time last year.” She feels going forward travellers will continuing to prioritize their discretionary spending on travel.