Indians plan last-minute travel for Diwali

October 17, 2014
, by wego admin

Bangalore, 17 October, 2014Wego has seen a surge in travel search activity just a month prior to India’s biggest holiday period, Diwali. India’s favourite travel comparison site reports a spike in flight searches 20 days prior to the national festival which begins on October 23, with international choices increasing almost 50 percent over last year.

The biggest change compared to last year where almost 98 per cent of traffic to www.wego.co.in was for domestic travel, was the almost even split this year of 43 per cent of flight searches being for international destinations and 57 per cent for domestic. In addition, international destination searches were far more diverse than previously.

“We’ve witnessed a growing interest in a variety of international destinations from Indian travellers throughout the year, outside of the traditionally popular locations,” said Jackson Fernandez, Managing Director of Wego India. “Travellers in this country are becoming far more adventurous and spend a great deal more time online researching alternate travel experiences, especially through their smartphones.”

“These results indicate that tourism offices are becoming more innovative with their destination marketing strategies successfully capturing the attention of Indian travellers. Airlines too have introduced attractive and competitive pricing structures to lure more travellers to international destinations,” Fernandez added. “We can also see that Indians are clearly taking advantage of the benefits that using Wego can provide, saving them enormous amounts of time and money on Diwali travel budgets, presenting all the best local and international flight and hotel deals available online, in one place.”

Singapore, Dubai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Bali were the most popular international city searches, while domestically New Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore and Kolkata topped the list.

The largest growth by country was for long haul destinations such as the United States (14 cities increased in growth), China, Indonesia, the UK and even New Zealand. Canada, France, Saudi Arabia and Australia also experienced an increase in growth, in fact, 52 countries experienced growth in outbound travel from India this year. Travellers in Delhi topped the number of outbound international flight searches by user, followed by Mumbai, Bangalore and Madras.

“Typically people travel home to spend time with their families to celebrate Diwali, but we’ve also seen an increase in searches to popular local holiday destinations such as Goa,” commented Fernandez.

“Although this annual festival is one of the largest in the country, it appears many travellers are happy to leave travel planning until closer to the event. This year we noticed flight searches increased dramatically around 20 days beforehand, which was similar to our experience last year, although in 2013 the weight of searches was during the last two weeks before Diwali.”

Hotel searches this year also spiked around a month ahead of Diwali and domestic destinations remain the most popular which is consistent with accommodation choices last year.

“Flight searches are far higher this year than in 2013 which indicates more people are on the move this year,” observed Fernandez. “Year-on-year, Diwali is a very interesting period for Wego. We get a great deal of insight into the travel patterns of Indians and the destinations they choose. We’re also reminded and somewhat overwhelmed, at just how popular Wego is today as the travel comparison site of choice for the Indian traveller.”

– ENDS –

For press enquiries and personal interview requests, please contact:

Anita Duffin
Press Office, Singapore
Wego Pte Limited
[email protected]

About Wego
Wego.com is the leading travel search engine across the Asia-Pacific and Middle East and is used by millions of travellers each month to save time, pay less and travel more. The company provides powerful yet simple to use tools that help travellers research trips, compare prices for flights and hotels across multiple websites, and to book travel online. Wego shows users an unbiased and channel neutral view of travel prices, providing a choice of booking direct with a hotel or airline, or via an online travel agent or aggregator. For more information, visit https://www.wego.com/about.