The era of the Mobile-first customer is here..and it’s here to stay! Cleartrip’s Quarterly Mobile Insight for Q4’14 reports an inflection point for the Mobile-first customers, as it points that over 53% of the total traffic emanates from the mobile channel, a first time ever for Cleartrip, overshadowing the desktop channel. Even more interesting is the fact that, over 70% of our mobile customers are now using mobile as their only channel for transactions. Also, this quarter, Cleartrip’s transactions grew by a whopping 214% YoY where mobile now accounts for 40% of overall transactions.
47% contribution to our mobile traffic comes from Mobile Web, and we stay committed to providing our customers the ease of using the channels they prefer. This accelerated our promise to offer a better and simpler experience over the Mobile Web, through our recently upgraded mobile website. Cleartrip Mobile has evolved to a point where more than half of our customers start with no prior experience on any other channel (website, phone), indicating the comfort and implicit trust our customers show for our apps & mobile website.
As our customers adopt Mobile as a main-stream channel to plan their travel, we strive in our efforts to give them a truly holistic experience. In line with this goal, we added several pre-booking (Quickeys, Pay@hotel, Expressway) & post-booking(Amendments, Cancellations & Check-ins) features on our app over the last few quarters and have received great response from our customers. A quick comparison of the utilization of a lot of these features already paints a better picture for mobile v/s. desktop, where indications of higher customer engagement over Mobile are reflected in higher retention & usage on mobile.
Mobile brands seem to be high up in the race for customer mind share, too. This quarter, Cleartrip noted a visibly strong growth in the usage of Micromax, Xiaomi & Google devices. In the last 6-months, the Samsung+Apple traffic share has reduced by ~10 share points, with distributed growth benefit for other brands.
2015 began at a clinging high for Cleartrip Mobile. We bagged the ‘Best User Experience’ Award at GSF2015, soon after getting featured by Apple in the ‘App Store Best Apps of 2014’ (only Indian travel app featured).
A look at the last quarter only encourages us in our efforts to constantly improve, better and evolve the customer experience on Cleartrip Mobile. And we’re at it each day.
