How Anuj Rathi is bringing some of the Swiggy stories to Cleartrip to help you travel better

Anuj Rathi, chief business and growth officer at Cleartrip.

Anuj Rathi, who used to build products at food aggregator Swiggy and later at fintech player Jupiter, had earlier this year decided to explore the travel space with the plans to devise solutions that would help Indians travel better.

One of the first products he built as chief business and growth officer for Flipkart- owned Cleartrip was a 'Bus Pass', a subscription plan for frequent bus travelers which he built along with his team.

In the past, Anuj was part of the Swiggy team which had built another subscription based model called Swiggy One.

The 'Bus Pass' is available for Rs 150 and travellers can make a maximum of five bookings and is valid for 90 days.

"I was part of the team that launched Swiggy Super (a membership programme) and then Swiggy One. While I am hoping to use a lot of learnings from my Swiggy and Jupiter days, the sectors are very different. For a high-frequency category like e-commerce and quick commerce, memberships work better. For a lower-frequency category like travel, passes work better. These are tough constructs, yet we see a lot of healthy greenshoots for our Bus Pass," he said.

Rathi said that there will not be a one-to-one product porting (from Swiggy and Jupiter) but there are a lot of ways in which they can get creative in travel. Cleartrip recorded 25-30 percent of its overall bus bookings through Bus Pass.

Betting big on buses

The 'Bus Pass' is available for Rs 150 and travellers can make a maximum of five bookings and is valid for 90 days.

"It (Bus Pass) was launched some three weeks back. And, we see a very strong demand from Tier-II cities," he said, sharing data around bus bookings on the travel app. Cleartrip had launched the bus category in April 2023 and has recorded a 150 percent growth with Indore-Bhopal, Bengaluru-Hyderabad, Indore-Pune, Chennai-Madurai and Coimbatore-Bengaluru emerging as the top routes with high repeat bookings.

Buses on the app have registered the highest number of frequent travellers with 32 percent of users repeating their bookings in the last three months. Around 15 percent of users book buses at least three times within three months. Bus users are also highly value-conscious, with 75 percent of travellers using discount coupons while booking.

"If the customer has come and started using that pass, we think that that the customer will move all their bus journeys to us. I think it is going to be like a hockey stick growth. That's why some of these products have a lot of potential," he added.

Rathi thinks buses and train segments have a lot of potential for OTAs to grow. "There are like 4.3-4.4 lakh domestic customers that fly out of India. But for buses, there are like 45 lakh travellers. It is 10 times the size of flights. For trains, there are around 17-18 lakh customers. However, only five lakh of bus travellers bought tickets online. So, there are a lot of people who are still not buying it online. That's where we see the opportunity."

Once people get familiar with booking buses online, a lot of those customers will also move to flights and hotels. Cleartrip added the train segment on its platform recently. "The online penetration of bookings for trains and buses has a lot of growth potential," he noted.

Eye on festive season

The travel platform is counting on the festive season. "Compared to last year, destinations like Kolkata for Durga Puja are seeing a 10 percent increase in bookings, despite elevated (air) fares. So, both volume and value are seeing growth. For Diwali, we are seeing a very similar uptake. But a lot of people wait for the Big Billion Days to start so that some people will hold on to make their festive bookings," Rathi said.

Flipkart's Big Billion Days, a festive shopping sale, will extend to the travel space too like last year with offers like domestic flights starting at Rs 999 or international flights at Rs 5,999. "This time, we are partnering with a bunch of five-star hotels, marking a strong entry into the hotels segment. Five-star hotels will start at Rs 2,499. One of my favourite constructs (under BBD) is child flies free."

Last year, Cleartrip's flight bookings compared to a normal period versus BBD grew about 1.9 times, while hotels grew about three times, and bus bookings increased 1.8 times. "This time, we are confident that we're going to overshoot all of them," he said.

Travel diaries

While travel is completely a new space for Rathi, he did some bit of tracking during the Covid years and that's when he saw the potential the sector holds.

"This is an intriguing industry that I've been tracking for a long time. When Covid happened, we saw a lot of changes across the world. I was visiting the Google office to look at the trends that seem to have fundamentally changed in India and how many of those trends had reversed. Travel stood out as a permanent opportunity and that stayed with me. And I kept tracking it," the Cleartrip executive said.

When this opportunity came to him, it seemed like one of the best places to join and help India travel much better. "I was at Swiggy at that time (during Covid) and our business went down, similar to travel. Even in quick commerce, food delivery, restaurant workers and delivery executives were not available. Most of all, consumers were very careful about allowing people in their homes. So, we were trying to think about how to reinvent ourselves. That was also the time we were looking at all the trends across which industries are going to go bust and which industries will boom," Rathi said.

This is when travel caught his attention. "EdTech, for example, had to boom. But we knew that it was not a permanent trend. Like once that settles, things will go back. But fintech, for instance, was a one-way trend. And that was a time like when I also started tracking travel, it seemed like a one-way trend. People came out and essentially the permanent shift happened with valuable experiences. I don't see things going down at all," he added.

Rathi, however, pointed out that the travel sector in India remained fragmented. "Hospitality is not that evolved in technology. I did not realise that one has to go 20 years back to programming languages to integrate in hospitality. That was surprising. The marketplace of hotels is not so straightforward to kind of just build a product and people will come. It is extremely detailed and there are so many nuances," he said.