The co-founder and group CEO at MakeMyTrip, Mr. Rajesh. Hi, thanks so much for your time today. Help us understand, with the festive season kickstarting slightly earlier this year compared to last year, how is overall sentiment around festival travel looking like this time?
Yeah, thanks for having me. You're absolutely right. It has started early this year and we are quite happy about that because the moment the sentiment and the mood swings towards festivities, the spending in general increases. And we're seeing that similar sort of trend for travel as well. Early days of October, we've started to see some positive moments. People started to book in advance for longer weekends around the Diwali period, and even starting to sort of look at later during the holidays period, whether it's Christmas or New Year. And we've seen that in the last few days pretty consistently. And I guess not only the festive season starting early, it's also the general season, high season for travel as well, and seasonality seems to be kicking in early as well. And also there is some impact this time around is also going to be the GST announcement that happened in general, right? So overall sort of consumption is expected to do better in the second half, and I think this is the quarter that will show sort of an impact of all these things coming together, hopefully very, very positive.
Indeed. Hi Mr. Rajesh, also help us understand which are the hot destinations for the type of trips that people are planning, because now that we will see the winter season kicking in, winter holidays, and lots more year-end as well. Where are we getting to see the most excitement in India as well as abroad? Where is the preference?
Yeah, happy to share and there are quite a few. The first and foremost, Goa is back, which is good news. Goa has always been sort of top of the mind destination for travelers in India, and it had slowed down a little bit in the past, but it is coming back now with a bang. And then the other sort of favorite state with many destinations in it during the winter season is actually Rajasthan. So you have Udaipur, you have Jodhpur, you have Jaisalmer, you have Jaipur, you know, just all these Rajasthan cities offer a lot. And they become strong preference for the consumers during the winter season as well. And then you start looking at even the hills, because people would also want to, you know, even have winters, some cohorts going to the hills, and there the Shimla scores quite well as well. And there's some, you know, it's always not only because of the season, but sometimes it's all the demand also revolves around some event happening. So if there's a cricket match happening in the Shimla, you would see demand growing there. And down south, you would see the usual destinations that do quite well is Coorg, Coorg of course, Kodaikanal, and Ooty for that matter. And then last but not the least is also Port Blair, and you saw SpiceJet announcement direct flight going to Port Blair. Port Blair is clearly a good destination for the Indian travelers as well. So these are the domestic destinations which are quite hot, which is more leisure. And I must add one very important sort of point during this festival season, particularly, there's a lot of VFR, going back home kind of travel that happens, and there all the top metros score quite high. We see a lot of the booking surge happening on the top metro cities as well during this time because people want to go back home and celebrate Diwali etc. Coming to the international destinations, the UAE, Dubai, and a combination of VFR and leisure, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam. Now within Vietnam, a very interesting destination that is getting a lot of traction is called Phu Quoc. In fact, we are starting this winter direct charter flights for that, trying to sort of open up that market even more for Indians because it hasn't really, you know, sort of people are not necessarily a lot more aware of this new destination. We had done this kind of activity back in the days for Phuket in Thailand as well, and this time around we are seeing some very interesting sort of experiences that Phu Quoc has to offer in Vietnam, and Vietnam in general is sort of gaining traction as well. So Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Dubai, and then European destinations.
Okay. So that's a long list of where we're seeing good demand right now, and of course some of the popular destinations as well. But Mr. Rajesh, talk to us about spiritual tourism. Now, ever since the Kumbh Mela earlier this year, this segment has picked up steam. Do you see this momentum continuing? Because pilgrimages and spiritual tourism, how does that stack up against regular travel?
I think it's a great point. And again, not necessarily on the seasonality. See, some part of the trend that we have seen is continuing and sustained. But during festivals also this sort of further momentum grows for pilgrimage travel as well. And it's quite broad-based now. It's not necessarily only sort of visiting temples and offering prayers, it's also just combining it with the leisure trip if you will. And the destinations that are doing, at least early days of October that we've seen from growth perspective, are doing quite well are actually Puri, Haridwar, Ayodhya, Rishikesh kind of destinations, and they're only going to grow. We had recently launched a full pilgrimage travel trend sort of report, which suggested that there are as many as some broad 54 odd cities that attract a lot of the pilgrimage travelers if you will, and then within that about 20-25 cities were growing at about 25%. The overall growth was double digit for about 54 cities as well. So it's also quite broad-based given the fact that the whole of India travels for pilgrimage and they look for sort of closer destinations and sometimes looking for new destinations. And I think during Diwali, Ayodhya is definitely going to see a lot of growth.
All right Mr. Rajesh, quite many interesting developments for MakeMyTrip, but you really made us think that where we should plan our next trip. Thank you so much for taking the time out and speaking with us and helping us understand the latest trends in travel.
