Latest report by IAMAI suggests consumer ecommerce will grow by around 30% this year. The high base effect of online travel is coming into play (almost accounting for 65-70% of the market). Not sure of the methodology (last three categories of Classifieds, Paid content and Digital downloads have somewhat uniform 50% growth rate) but a 30% revenue growth rate at such a small size is certainly not exciting.
While the report suggests key barriers to growth of online travel are payment mechanism, low internet penetration, etc, other people I speak to tell me that online air ticketing is already more than 50% of the overall airline ticketing market. I am not sure if the barrier due to payments etc is any larger for hotels etc. While the airline ticketing market will by and large start deriving off the overall industry growth (the channel shift growth will be low), other product categories and user experience around that could be the key drivers to pulling the growth numbers up.
These numbers do not seem to include the online advertising market, which should be another 400-500 crores this year.
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To make Krish’s point directly financial, if I want to reschedule/cancel, having booked from the aggregators, I have to pay penalties at both the airline and the aggregator. So, I always buy direct from the airlines after looking up the prices at Cleartrip/Yatra/Travelguru.
Re: larger point of the original post, a slightly worrying news today was http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/419-quarterly-telecom-performance-indias-internet-subscriber-base-declines-/