India is the biggest market for travel portalBooking.com in Asia Pacific and is outpacing China in supply growth, a trend the company expects to continue this year as well, a top executive said.
“We enjoyed healthy double digits growth in India in 2018 and we expect the same this year as well. We have grown our supply quite drastically in the last twelve months. We have about 50,000 properties and see a lot of interest in alternative accommodation like apartments and guesthouses here. We are seeing a big increase here from a supply as well as a customer perspective,” said Angel Mancas, VP and managing director of Booking.com for Asia Pacific.
Amsterdam based Booking.com is by far the largest business within Booking Holdings, which generates over “More than half of our transactions in India are on mobile and we will ramp up our investments for mobile. We have several markets growing quite fast like Korea, Japan and Indonesia but India is on top of our list and is important not just in APAC but globally as well. We expect the chunk of the growth to come from domestic travel here. There are a lot of opportunities to grow here in secondary and tertiary cities. Until recently, most customers in tier two and tier three cities in India preferred to book hotels and accommodations through offline means, which is changing swiftly as we move ahead,” said Mancas.
“69% of Indian customers want to try alternative accommodation as per our previous surveys. We have seen it increase much faster during the last one year and we want to make sure we capture that traffic,” he added.
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