Online travel portal ClearTrip has today announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount in a fresh round, as it continues to take on heavier rivals like MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo. The latest round of funding comes from Concur Technologies and Gund Investment.
Along with them, other existing investors also participated in this round. The current funding round takes the total funding raised by the company to $75 million. It also raised an internal round in February – March this year that was led by a few existing investors.
As for the new ‘Local’ section, it will help consumers book places in the city ranging from food joints to yoga classes and adventure sports like Dirt Biking. While activities as a separate segment was launched in 2015, it is now that the company has divided it into four categories. On its app, Cleartrip is offering four sub-categories — events, fitness, food and adventure.
The Locals segment has average ticket size of Rs 300 to 350 compared to Rs 8000 to 9000 in travel segment, thus helping the company push up sales, and scale up faster. Accordingly thus, it is targeting transactions from this segment to make up 50% of its total revenue in the next three years.
The firm has also lined up a television ad campaign. The campaign has an estimated budget of $1.5 million. The commercial is expected to come on air in July.
Matthew Spacie, Stuart Crighton and Hrush Bhatt formed the company in 2006. Prior to this funding round, it’s most recent funding round was worth $5.4 million in May 2014.
Speaking about this, Cleartrip CEO Samyukth Sridharan says,
People spend close to 40 weekends at home and it is a big market. Activity is probably about half the size of the travel market itself in terms of consumers but it is extremely fragmented. Travel business in India is roughly $6-7 Billion.
In this segment, its major rivals includes MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo, both of whom are flush with investor money. In January, MakeMyTrip raised $180 Million from China’s Ctrip.com, following which Naspers Group announced that it would invest $250 million in Goibibo.
