We will scale up ad spending next year: Shubham K, Cleartrip

The travel industry this year saw a huge boom as people left the fear of the pandemic behind them and head out to enjoy vacations. Not just leisure travel, but business travel as well as the new trend of workcation helped this pandemic-battered industry to get back to its feet. Online booking agency Cleartrip has taken a step further and introduced new offers to grab the attention of its customers and acquire new ones. In a conversation with exchange4media, Brand Head Shubham K talks about the launch of new Clear Advantage offering, the ad spending plan for next year and the future of travel sector in 2023.

Edited Excerpts

Can you tell us more about Clear Advantage?

We came up with a whole bouquet of products called Clear Advantage. The name is very carefully chosen, because we believe that they are our clear advantage. So, there are about three or four such products and there are more which are in the pipeline. In fact, there are a couple which have also gotten recently launched. So, the first is what we call CT Flex Max. CT Flex Max actually just allows you to cancel or modify your domestic flights, or dates of those flights absolutely free of cost. The second product is a no cost EMI for international flights. We've seen that international travel is coming back with a vengeance. A lot of people want to travel but obviously the fares have been expensive because it's pretty much the season which is coming up. Especially when people travel internationally the sum of the fares could be very discretionary, it almost may be a barrier for you to want to travel. Therefore, we're offering a free no cost EMI for three months. The third offering is hotel cancellations or you may call it easy hotel cancellation. On more than 20,000 hotels we are offering that you can cancel and get the full refund up to 24 hours before check in. The last one, which we believe is one of our key USPs, is not really a separate offering per se, but our consumer experience team works very hard to make this happen. It is instant refund initiation.

What media mix are you using to promote these offers?

We heavily rely on digital for most of our media plans. We do that because we believe that a significant proportion of our present customers and our potential customers rests on digital. So, digital is going to be pretty significant part of the mix. And when I say digital, I'm talking about the entire Facebook family of apps and services, the entire Google family of apps, including YouTube, as well other channels like Spotify are part of the mix. We're also looking at television, so we are keeping a significant offline mix in this as well. Other than that, we are looking at, activating social in a very, very big way. Beyond that we are looking at one or two OTT's in the mix. We're also evaluating a couple of sporting events which are coming up which should also start very, very soon.

How does ClearTrip’s marketing and ad spending look like for the next year?

While we've been active through the year, a lot of our spends and a lot of our big marketing campaigns have been skewed towards the latter half for a couple of reasons. One, because of the big sale event and two also because this is when we believe we're ready with Clear Advantage and ready to take it to market. We're looking to coincide with the big travel season as well. So next year is going to be slightly more scaled compared to this year, if not similar. And next year, we're going to of course start a little early in terms of going big with our campaigns as well. But spend-wise, it would be a slight scale up. I can't tell you the exact numbers. It will be a little more spread out, it will be sort of a little more front-loaded compared to this year where we started somewhere towards the later part of the year.

What do you think will be the future of travel sector in 2023?

We’ve actually seen a lot of optimism in travel as a sector, especially in the last few months. It is coming back and it is coming back with a vengeance. On international, we've seen a massive renewal also starting earlier this year, especially in the short haul sectors, like Southeast Asia, all of the Middle East is where we've started seeing a lot of return to pre COVID levels as well. Of course, I think one report says that by 2024 is when it will come back to exactly the same levels as 2019, which is the pre- COVID levels. But I think if I remember the numbers correctly, this year, it's getting back to roughly about the 70% to 80% of pre-COVID levels already. So yeah, in both domestic and international, we are seeing a lot of renewed optimism.