World Cup 2023: As India celebrates 'festival of cricket', travel demand sees unprecendented rise, says Easy Trip Planners

"This year, we have a bigger festival, cricket, which is coinciding with other festivals like Diwali, because of which demand has been unprecedented," he said.

Consequently, there has been an unprecedented surge in demand, and an analysis on the numbers revealed that this year's demand is 72% higher compared to the same period last year. Since the travel industry follows cyclical patterns, providing month-to-month demand figures may not be relevant. Therefore, he is comparing it to the demand from the same time frame last year.

"The demand has gone up by 72% and especially routes like Delhi-Ahmedabad for obvious reasons, have seen a surge of 89%. Then, Delhi-Srinagar is doing well for the tourist reasons. And Delhi-Bangalore is up by about 30%, Delhi-Mumbai is up by about 20%. But the biggest pie which we are seeing is basically for Ahmedabad for the cricket match, which is due in the next week," he said.

Regarding high prices, he believes it isn't discouraging people from attending and watching their favorite cricketers at the cricketing epicenter. Hotels and flights are fully booked. In fact, airlines are looking to add more seats on certain routes, and there is no negative impact on profit margins in any way.

“I don't think it is stopping people to go out and watch their favorite cricketers at the Mecca and Medina of the cricket, which is the World Cup and the hotels, the flights, everything is going choc-a-bloc. In fact, I believe that the airlines are trying to add up the newer inventory for certain routes, and hence I don't think so it's eating up the margin in any sense,” he stated.

At the time of listing, only 3% of its business was hotel business and the remaining was flight business, now it is almost about 10%.

The company has quadrupled its flight business and the hotel business has grown up by 10 times since the listing.

In terms of viewership, the economists anticipate that the total number of Indian viewers for the tournament, encompassing both television and streaming platforms, will surpass the 552 million viewers recorded in 2019. This surge in viewership could lead to TV rights and sponsorship revenue ranging from Rs 10,500 crore to Rs 12,000 crore, even when taking a conservative approach.

The company has developed an advanced technology associated with a state-of-the-art smart voice recognition system, which includes a multilingual natural language processing (NLP) system. As a result of this innovation, the company has witnessed a substantial increase in demand from individuals in tier-III and tier-IV regions.

“We have created in-house a machine learning algorhythm by which one can speak in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil to our voicebot to find best alternates to take flights or book hotels and holidays,” he explained.

The company has set its sights on achieving a profit of approximately Rs 250 crore in the ongoing fiscal year.

In the online travel agency (OTA) sector, the company currently holds a market share of approximately 22%.

Founded in 2008 by Nishant Pitti, Rikant Pitti, and Prashant Pitti, Easy Trip is a digital travel company based in India. The company is headquartered in New Delhi and offers a range of services, including hotel bookings, flight reservations, vacation packages, bus reservations, and white-label solutions. EaseMyTrip has a global presence, with offices in Singapore, the UAE, the Maldives, and Thailand. Furthermore, the company has customized websites catering to specific countries such as the UAE, the UK, and Thailand.