Travel has traditionally been a seasonal business, with marketers dividing demand into peak, lean and shoulder periods. Today, the consumer approach towards travel has taken a different turn. Travelling around concerts, sporting events, festivals and personal occasions is the new norm. Travel, today, is less about ‘when’ and more about ‘why’.
Manmeet Ahluwalia, Chief Marketing Officer, EaseMyTrip explains how this is reshaping the role of online travel aggregators (OTAs). Having spent over two decades in the travel and marketing ecosystem, Ahluwalia believes the category is moving from simply fulfilling travel demand to creating and curating travel moments. “I would say this stems from a very simple consumer insight, specific to our category, wherein travel bookings have gradually moved from pure seasonality to more occasion-based moments,” he says.
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Music concerts, sports events, art fairs and festivals such as the Jaipur Literary Festival are the new triggers for travel. A consumer may not be travelling because it is the traditional holiday season, but because there is a concert they want to attend or an event they want to experience. For OTAs, that means the opportunity lies in being part of the occasion itself. The alteration is also visible in how consumers travel through traditionally slower periods. Ahluwalia points out that the industry once spoke of peak, lean and shoulder seasons. Today, “there is nothing called lean season.” While families continue to plan around school and college holidays, other cohorts, including DINKs, solo travellers and friend groups, are travelling throughout the year.
Summer travel is changing. People are looking for something called ‘staycation.’A consumer visiting Rajasthan in May or June may not necessarily be looking to explore the destination. They could simply be looking to spend a few days at a luxury resort, use the spa and pool, unwind and return home. The destination remains the same, but the travel occasion and format have changed.
This understanding also informs how EaseMyTrip approaches brand-building. Around 75% of the marketing budget is allocated to performance marketing, while the remainder goes towards brand-building initiatives such as sports, sponsorships and influencer marketing. Print, outdoor and CTV also remain part of the mix, depending on the audience and objective. For instance, rather than relying heavily on broad-reach television advertising, EaseMyTrip is focused more on sports and event sponsorships to reach specific consumer cohorts.
“If a cricket fan sees EaseMyTrip as a travel sponsor with the Women's Premier League, the passion point happens to be merging with the brand, automatically creating a higher resonance and connection with the consumer,” he explains. Movie promotion borrows the same approach. While travel and entertainment may not have an obvious natural fit, Ahluwalia sees movie integrations and sports sponsorships or lifestyle events as ways for the brand to borrow an existing passion point.
The objective, however, is not simply to place a logo on a property. EaseMyTrip uses experiential strategies like social media contests, movie tickets and other activations to create deeper engagement. In sports, the brand takes the association further by building travel products around the event itself, combining flights, hotels, packages and local transportation. This in a way, makes the association easier to measure. Social media engagement, including comments, shares, reposts and participation, offers one set of indicators, while travel products linked to specific events provide a more direct way of assessing the efficacy of the partnership.
But as OTAs compete aggressively on discounts and sales, the bigger question is whether price can remain the primary differentiator. For EaseMyTrip, Ahluwalia says, it cannot.
The company's zero-convenience-fee proposition was built around a broader promise of transparency and reassurance rather than simply offering a cheaper fare. “Price wars in e-commerce are table stakes,” he says, adding that brands that eventually win have to build salience, trust and credibility beyond price. And when it comes to marketing effectiveness, instead of looking only at the number of new consumers acquired, EaseMyTrip looks at lifetime value and repeat percentage. The post-booking experience, Ahluwalia believes, plays a critical role in determining whether a consumer returns. And that is where the travel brand focuses on more.
Initiatives like retention marketing, loyalty programmes and conversational engagement plays a supreme role in this picture. If a consumer drops off a booking page, for instance, the brand can trigger a WhatsApp message asking whether they faced a problem or need help completing the reservation.
The brand is also looking beyond its core flight business. Hotels, holidays, insurance and charter flights are among the areas where EaseMyTrip sees further opportunity. At the same time, Tier II and Tier III markets are emerging as important growth areas, although the destination and product mix can differ from that of metros. Pilgrimage destinations, hill stations, Goa and budget hotels continue to see demand, even as consumers gradually aspire towards international travel and more premium experiences.
Another upgrade is taking place at the technology layer. Ahluwalia believes agentic commerce could fundamentally alter how travel bookings happen. In the future, the consumer may not be the one making the booking at all. An AI agent could search, evaluate and transact on the traveller's behalf. That, he believes, will create a new challenge for brands: winning the trust of the AI agent as well as the consumer. EaseMyTrip has already begun experimenting through its EVA AI-assisted agent and ChatGPT integration, with the larger objective of making the journey from discovery to booking more seamless.
At its heart, the travel business is still about understanding what makes people want to go. For EaseMyTrip, that could mean spotting a new consumer habit, finding a fresh reason to travel or simply making the journey feel a little more personal. Ahluwalia concludes, “The idea is to offer maximum convenience, reduce friction as much as possible to make their entire journey smooth, from research and discovery to the final booking of the product and, to a certain extent, the post-booking experiences.” In the end, the next destination may be unpredictable, but understanding the traveller would be what keeps a brand ahead.
