ICC investment is helping us increase focus on Indian market: Santosh Kumar, Booking.com

Booking.com on Tuesday launched its marketing campaign “Howzat for Your Perfect Stay” in Mumbai ahead of the much-awaited Cricket World Cup which is being hosted in India from October 5. The digital travel brand is a global sponsor of ICC events. The campaign features Indian team captain Rohit Sharma along with international cricketers Jos Buttler, captain of England team and Australian cricketer Glenn Maxwell. 

“We will rope in influencers as well to make our World Cup campaign more interesting,” says Santosh Kumar, Booking.com’s Country Head - Indian subcontinent & Indonesia, in an exclusive interaction with exchange4media. Kumar was in Mumbai for the campaign launch. 

Kumar also explains why brand marketing is crucial for Booking.com to expand its footprint in tier 2 and tier 3 cities:  

Excerpts: 

What are your marketing plans for this World Cup season? 

Traditionally, we have invested pretty heavily on the digital marketing side since we started off as an online brand. But in the last few years, we've been investing quite heavily on the brand marketing side also. So, sports tourism is our main focus area because large events, whether it is sports or any other large events for that matter, tends to attract large audiences who travel from within and outside the country to these destinations.

Sports is one area in which we have decided to double down on. In the US, we have done Super Bowl ads. We sponsored Major League Baseball in Europe. We're doing the US UEFA Soccer League. Recently this year, we also sponsored the FIFA Women's World Cup, which happened in Australia. 

And of course, cricket. Cricket goes hand-in-hand with India to a large extent. Over 90% of the fans globally are located in India. Therefore, India is a priority market for us and it makes a lot of sense for us to invest in this partnership with ICC. I think sports is a stimulant for the economy in general because destinations are benefiting from it.

The local host city benefits because there's an influx of fans traveling from across the country. But also inbound, we are seeing a lot of traffic, which is coming into India from other countries. So it's all around. It's good news for the economy, for the destination, for local providers, whether they're providing hotels or blending alternate accommodation. Local entrepreneurs are also benefiting. 

In an earlier interaction with e4m, you had called your ICC partnership a “marriage between sports and travel”. How successful has your partnership with ICC been in terms of Return of Investment? 

This marriage has been fairly successful because sports and travel go really well together. We continue announcing a new partnership in a new sport year by year. 

Our partnership with ICC is now five years old. It has benefited us in many ways, not restricted only to India. We are a global company and when we position our business, it's from three perspectives-inbound (into the country), domestic (within the country), and it's outbound as well. So inbound, we are seeing an increase in flight searches. UK, Australia, Netherlands and Sri Lanka are some of the top countries from where we saw significantly more flight bookings in October and November compared to last year. 

Our integrated marketing campaign will appear wherever the ICC broadcast is happening. We will get eyeballs, wherever our campaign appears all across the world. It surely benefits us. All cricket playing nations are our focus with our world cup campaign this year. 

Cricket generates most of the eyeballs and revenue in India. It has been 12 years since the last World Cup happened in India. So, there's a lot of excitement that's built up for it. Probably after the IPL, this is the second biggest event that has happened this year in India apart from the G20.

From a consumer perspective, we are expecting a lot of brand awareness to build up with this campaign in India for us today. And we also expect this to drive incremental demand for all our partners, whether it's flights, cars, attractions or hotels. We have always traditionally been strong in accommodations, but now we are also focusing on all the other segments. So we are hoping that our campaign drives increased awareness of the products we have and the platforms we have.

How much growth are you expecting through the World Cup?

I can't share an exact number with you. Organically, we are growing in double digits. So, I would be very very disappointed if we did not grow significantly following the world cup. I can’t share India-specific figures, but I can tell you that our Asia business was up 40% for the second quarter (April-June) year-on-year. 

What were the major factors behind such phenomenal growth in Q2? 

Last year, all destinations were still not open. China opened toward the end of the year. But all the other countries were open in this Q2. Besides, travellers' confidence is also very high as safety concerns have gone away. Indians are really raring to go out into the world.

We continue to see strong demand and strong growth in the Indian market. The overall travel market in India has bounced back over 2019 levels. I would expect that trend to kind of continue in the next few years.

What is your marketing spends for India and what is the media mix?

We can’t share country-specific data, but last year, for the full year, we spent somewhere around $6 billion globally on marketing. Majority of it was digital advertising because that's where traditionally we are the strongest. Digital is the channel where we receive a lot of our direct business from. 

The brand marketing makes sense in countries or areas where we see it as a priority, where we need to make our brand better known and better exemplified. From an Indian perspective, we are fairly well known in the big cities but when it comes to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, we still have work to do to make our brand well-known.

While we are very relevant to our partners all across the country, we also want to be relevant to consumers. Therefore, we are also investing a lot on social media. 

We introduced our Instagram handle for India a few months ago. We collaborated with several influencers on the occasion. Some of those influencers will be roped in for our World Cup campaign as well. 

How do you plan to expand further in India?

We are trying to introduce new languages on the platform. We introduced Hindi early this year for our consumers and partners to book with us. After that, we are witnessing a lot of traffic from Tier 2 and Tier 3 of the cities in India and also from the US. There are a lot of Indians, especially the Gujarat community, which owns a lot of motels and hotels in the US. They started using our platform in Hindi. 

Hence, we are investing more and more in India. This ICC marketing investment is basically helping us to increase our focus on the Indian market.