Online Travel Market

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Trip Advisor, Priceline - each carved out a unique niche for itself in Online Travel, and established a hot new category at the very beginning of Internet in US. The overall travel market today is $518 billion between US and Europe alone. China’s online travel services market reached $31.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2005 (Source: Analysys International). But China’s online travel market will grow to $9.6 billion by 2009.

In India, the total online travel market size was $368 million in 2006, and $523 million in 2007. Though the exact statistics for 2009 isn’t available but it can be assumed to run in billions. The overall Indian Travel sector is growing tremendously, forecasted to be $32 Billion (2008).The category is receiving venture capital: Yatra from Norwest’s Promod Haque, and TravelGuru from Westbridge Capital’s K.P. Balraj are two examples which are playing in the mass market. MakeMyTrip.com was an early entrant that is already at a $40 M+ revenue.

The US market, in its turn, is becoming mature, and more segmented, as vendors start differentiating by focusing on specific niches. One of the favorite examples is Groople, which focuses on Group Travel. Michael Stacy, CEO, Groople said “We think there’s a $40 billion market not online yet. When you look at the size of the market the opportunity is tremendous.” This is nostalgic as we often traveled in large groups of friends and family in the lane of memories.

Posted By - Jaspreet Kaur.