India's domestic tourism market is growing strong, but the country is lagging behind South-East Asian peers when it comes to attracting a sizeable number of foreign tourists, online travel platform ixigo's co-founder Aloke Bajpai told Moneycontrol, underscoring the need to improve the holiday experience to drive greater inbound tourism.
“It needs a lot of introspection by the private sector as well as the government as to what we can do to at least be at par with several of our South-East Asian counterparts in terms of the number of inbound travellers and the amount of foreign exchange earnings that can come with that,” said Aloke Bajpai.
Around 12 million foreign tourists are estimated to visit India every year, with most of them opting for high-end experiences in luxury or five-star properties. Such travellers find that some pockets of the country have outpriced themselves compared to their South-East Asian counterparts, according to ixigo’s co-founder.
The second type of travellers are young explorers who're here to experience spirituality or India’s culture, Bajpai said. “This segment continues to have that charm of coming to India with some amount of ability to ignore the experiential gaps that still exist at these destinations. I think we need to up the destination experience significantly,” he added, stressing that the nation needs to make its holiday destinations more accessible at the last mile.
“You might have a flight now reaching an airport, but what happens after that? How easy is it to navigate around that city? A classic example is Goa. Everybody goes there for the beach experience but the amount of footfalls it has, it has the potential to also become a destination for many other attractions that can be developed there,” said ixigo's co-founder Aloke Bajpai.
According to Bajpai, India needs to become a country known for great hospitality in a safe environment. On the perceptions barometer in terms of whether it's safety or quality of infrastructure, we are lagging, he added, stressing that the experience beyond the main attractions can be improved.
“Let's say in Agra, beyond the Taj Mahal, I think the kind of experience people go back with can be improved dramatically. A lot of experiential infrastructure creation needs to happen. A lot of investment needs to come into that,” said Aloke Bajpai.
There is work being done on that front, for instance, a Disneyland coming up in the NCR region. “The next 10 years will be really about this.”
If India doesn't develop these experiences, people will instead choose to go to Vietnam, Bali or Thailand, because for the same price they are getting a better experience, Bajpai added.
Entrepreneurship as a Service
ixigo's Aloke Bajpai also talked about how people need to think of entrepreneurship as a service to customers, the nation and a service to all stakeholders. "That attitude allows you to build more empathy for what you're doing and for who you are serving."
"If you think of yourself as someone who sells tickets, I don't think that true purpose of serving the traveller is achieved but if you think of someone who's trying to sell peace of mind to travellers then you're solving every moment of anxiety before, during and after the trip and therefore you become more relevant over time," said Bajpai.
Ixigo’s co-founder also said the country is at a point where policies are conducive towards growing the startup ecosystem. "The dream of being a developed country by 2047 is very inspiring for every Indian to pick up something that they are passionate about and serve customers in that domain with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI)."
The AI Drive
The true agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities will be those that can take care of everything right from the pre-booking stage, planning stage, till the post booking or the servicing stage in a more pre-emptive or proactive manner, rather than waiting for travellers to click a few buttons or talk to someone, Bajpai said.
The online travel platform said ixigo's voice AI as of June quarter is taking care of more than 60 percent of its customer calls. "Having said that, there's a caveat that we will never aspire to take these numbers to 100%. And the reason being that there are use cases where people actually want to talk to a real human being," said ixigo's co-founder.
"In the next few quarters, the platforms will provide enough in terms of tech capabilities to make that difference less discernible whether you're talking to an AI or a human. But till the time that happens, I think there will be use cases where human involvement will be important," Bajpai said.
Yet every quarter, any company who's building with AI will see incremental capabilities being taken over by the AI bot, Bajpai added.
"There are parts that happen behind the scene, where you're helping someone change a ticket or change a minor error that they made in their name, and going and talking to the airline to actually make those changes. Some parts of those are also being done agentically now which improves and speeds up your ability to service that customer," he said.
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