Hotelbeds has doubled its business in India in the past three years and is seeing a strong interest in its under-the-radar tours and activities unit.
It is celebrating ten years in India this year. Sam Turner, sales director for Hotelbeds, said that the business has averaged a 35% annual compound growth rate in the market, with overall volumes doubling in the past three years.
He explained that India is currently an international source market for Hotelbeds, with its overseas inventory distributed to and sold by OTAs and high street agents.
"We've got relationships with all the major B2C OTAs in the market who connect to us via our API. Its different from Europe in that the B2C space is dominated by local, domestic brands - Expedia and Booking are here but have nowhere near the dominance they have in other markets.
"And there is still a massive amount of travel booked in India via high street agencies, and we work with wholesalers who aggregate our content and distribute it via regional networks. In second, third tier cities the offline-to-online shift is happening more slowly than in big cities, and by working with aggregators we can get the smaller retail agencies."
Mobile is driving a big change in the Indian market, particularly in the B2C segment. Turner noted that APItude - Hotelbeds' rearchitected API launched last November - "supports mobile through the lightness of the API, its speed and performance."
Turner noted that its success in India has been achieved without tackling the domestic market. "We know that domestic and internal travel is huge in India and we are looking at ways to work with the budget hotel aggregators who have access to a huge domestic inventory."
Hotelbeds also sells tours, activities and transfers. Turner noted that it was seeing "the take-up and growth in activities is a lot quicker than hotels and the conversion is strong as well".
Like hotels, it is looking to build domestic tours inventory for local and inbound visitors. Hotelbeds Group owns an inbound destination management company, Le Passage To India, which offers tours to inbound visitors through various brands, so there is an infrastructure in place to sell some tours and activities domestically.
Overall, Hotelbeds "is moving away from its European legacy" and expanding into new markets, with Asia-Pacific clearly of interest. Turner said that "China is now one of our top ten source markets globally, India is just outside the top ten and Asia-Pacific is our fastest growing region."
Related reading from Tnooz:
HotelBeds and What Now create app to give hotels revenue from activities (Sept16)
Hotelbeds sold for Euro 1.2 billion to Cinven and CPPIB (April 2016)
Hotelbeds strengthens presence in major markets (March 2016)