Business Travel is more TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN
Rakshit Desai, Managing Director, Flight Centre Travel Group – India, believes that while buyer behaviour is changing, the way industry participants respond is also evolving
How has technology changed the MICE landscape in India?
Online players are grappling with a change in model. Historically, they could just buy traffic by advertising or buying keywords on Google. But the migration from a web platform to a native mobile app environment is not obvious whilst confidence levels on customers being able to migrate and be able to use mobile tools and technology is pretty high. About 80 per cent of our business in corporate are institutional in nature. For us the platform moves like it used to sit in the data warehouse. Now, it is in the cloud. Later, it may move to a mobile environment.
What destinations do you see catching up?
Currently, we see people travelling to UK and US. We also see a fair amount of MICE business starting to go high-end and much more experiential with places like Scandinavia, South Africa, East Africa, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.
How do you see the market evolve?
We have found that the buyer behaviour is changing and the way industry participants responds is also evolving – it is a much more technology-driven space now. We are talking about enterprise IT solutions, IT integration, and
custom development, mobile applications and it’s a very fragmented space on the supplier side. We see a fair amount of consolidation taking place as service providers combine to be able to service their customers better.