NEW DELHI : An estimated 50 million workers who left the global hospitality industry in the last three years amid the devastating impact of the pandemic may never return to work. This has caused a major challenge for hotels, travel agencies, and other travel service providers, who are struggling to find enough staff to meet a post-covid surge in demand. However, one company sees this as an opportunity to assist these businesses in generating more revenues.
NSE-listed RateGain Travel Technologies Ltd expects that technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in shaping the future of travel planning as the industry tackles the labour shortage. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, hotels and airlines worldwide have shown remarkable recovery and have even surpassed their pre-covid performance. However, the industry now faces a new reality where traditional approaches to attracting talent may no longer be effective.
“Trip planning, at present, is a very broken experience. Even with consumer technology driving hyper-personalization and the likes of Google and Facebook entering travel, the entire trip experience continues to be that way because the entire technology system continues to be fragmented, and till the time hotels start approaching it as an ‘experience problem’, instead of treating it as a ‘technology problem’, we will be stuck with the same bad experiences,” said Bhanu Chopra, managing director at RateGain.
The company amalgamates user data from its hotels, car rentals, and airline and OTA clients around the world. While they don’t receive the names and other deeper details, they can accurately follow bookings made by users across several websites. “Travel demand is at an all-time high and when demand explodes in any business, it must be tackled by deploying manpower or technology and unfortunately, hotels are unable to do both,” Chopra said.
RateGain’s operating revenue jumped 54% to ₹565.1 crore in FY23 while profit after tax jumped more than eightfold to ₹68.4 crore from ₹8.4 crore during the period.
“Covid was harmful for us as an industry, but it has changed the industry for the longer term. Unlike other industries, this demand is going to continue to hold. The travel industry — the airlines, the hotels — they are making bumper money; their numbers are off the charts,” he said.
And the numbers stack up. According to RateGain research, outbound international flight bookings from India have exceeded pre-covid levels this summer as many more people travelled abroad. This trend will continue into the festive season amid a surge in bookings for domestic and international flights.
In terms of inbound international flight bookings to India, RateGain has seen a 15% increase this summer compared to last year. The demand is primarily driven by business travel. This segment of business travel to India is about 68% higher than in 2022 for the same period.
For the most part, Chopra feels hotel rates around the world are stabilizing and in India, it could be due to the increase in events this year that lifted prices. “China was the biggest outbound travel country to the rest of the world but now we see a lot of impulsive travel coming out of India and the world has recognized that,” he added.
For popular destinations around the world, room prices are 40-50% higher than the previous year. India is also seeing a rise in room prices by up to 20%. Events such as Taylor Swift and Beyonce’s Musical Tours and the Cricket World Cup are also pushing prices further, and these destinations are seeing a steep rise in prices up to 10x of the non-season demand.
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Updated: 21 Jul 2023, 11:08 PM IST
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