Key Highlights:

Rise of corporate flight bookings as most preferred option as compared to retail bookings due to incentives such as free meals, free cancellations, and free seat selections

Average advance booking period of company is 2.3 days (mean) and 1.7 days (median)

Average length of business trips is 1.8 days, with close to 57% of all business travel being day trips

One-fifth (19.4%) of the tickets booked by corporate travellers are cancelled or rescheduled

1.5x is the time taken to complete group bookings against individual bookings

Bangalore, April 18, 2018: Shorebird Technologies, the makers of Tripeur, the 3^rd generation, end-to-end digital Corporate Travel Management Platform, has released its “State of Corporate Travel” report.  The report capturing key trends in the corporate travel space in India has been prepared from the data obtained from the Tripeur platform. The report unveils some interesting insights on airline fares, travel booking patterns by companies, flight tickets cancellation and rescheduling patterns, length per business trip and group booking trends by various companies.

Airline fares: According to the report, there is a broad gap ranging from 0% to 50% in the corporate flight fares as compared to retail fares. However, owing to better incentives, companies are increasingly opting for corporate fares over retail fares. Tripeur witnessed a growth from 43.8% (of all tickets booked on) corporate fares in 2017, to 64.1% in the first quarter of 2018.

Booking patterns: The report highlights that corporate travellers book their travel 2.3 days in advance on average (mean) and the median is around 1.7 days. While some travellers book their tickets on the same day, most of them book one or two days in advance. Some of them book several days in advance for attending events or a fixed schedule travel.

Length of trips: According to the report, the average length of business trip is 1.8 days, with close to 57% of all business travel being day trips.

Cancellations and rescheduling: Business travel being fluid in nature and dependent on multiple stakeholders’ schedules, witnesses higher number of cancellations or reschedules as compared to personal travel bookings. According to Tripeur’s data, close to one-fifth (19.4%) of the tickets booked by corporate travellers are cancelled or rescheduled.

Group travel booking trends: According to the report, 1.5x is the time taken to complete group bookings against individual bookings as each traveller provides his/her preferences which makes it complex for travel desk. 

Thiagarajan Rajagopalan, Founder & CEO, Tripeur said “We are excited to release India’s first ever ‘State of Corporate Travel’ report. Corporate Travel is a USD 40 Billion industry in India, and yet, there hardly exist any data-backed trends and insights to understand this space. With Tripeur, we are uniquely positioned not only to alleviate the pain points of various stakeholders through innovative use of advanced digital technologies (such as AI & ML), but also use the same technologies to provide data-backed inputs for companies to make informed decisions, and potentially optimize their spends. This is the key objective of launching this report. And, we plan to release updated versions of it, periodically”.