Travel portals eye smaller towns

As the demand for air travel picks up in the smaller towns across the country, travel portals are aggressively moving into these markets outside the six metros wooing aspirant air travellers with easier booking facilities.

Most of the prominent travel sites like makemytrip, yatra and cleartrip claim that the places to look at now are smaller cities like Varanasi, Surat, Chandigarh, Baroda, Ludhiana, Vizag and Coimbatore.

These portals are setting up kiosks, tying up with internet cafes and actively tying up with cellular service providers to cater to these sectors.

Cleartrip.com, for instance, which sells over 5,000 online air tickets a day, has plans to open up in cities like Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Kochi and Coimbatore in the next 6-8 months.

"We might be looking at the format of a kiosk. We already have kiosks in five Big Bazaar outlets in Mumbai. If we expand in these non-metro cities, it will primarily be through tie-ups with Big Bazaar," said Sandeep Murthy, CEO, cleartrip.

Cleartrip has plans to expand to 75 Big Bazaar outlets across the 50 cities throughout the country in the next 12 months, depending on the success of the outlets in Mumbai.

Apart from expanding their physical presence, some travel portals like makemytrip are also aggressively taking advantage of the fact that mobile penetration in India is much deeper than internet penetration.