Big data and machine learning liven up the Indian online travel space

The travel industry in India is buzzing with startups and established players innovating quickly to get ahead of the pack. Portals like MakeMyTrip excel in airline and hotel bookings. Others focus on destination discovery, providing curated content. Now, big data and machine learning are creating new possibilities.

In a previous article, we saw how Bangalore startup FindmyCarrots uses natural language processing (NLP) to help people find destinations or hotels. For six years, the US-based Hopper also tried to do that with different tools before pivoting to predictive analytics of flight prices. The Hopper homepage today offers to let travelers choose “when to fly and buy”.

Others like Expedia’s YourVisit, Israeli firm Evature and the MakeMyTrip-backed ixiGo in India are now joining the race to let travelers “search like a human”.

Arijit Mukherjee, co-founder of FindmyCarrots (FmC), says these moves validate his premise that travelers are game for interesting tech and are demanding better solutions from the online travel industry. He believes FindmyCarrots has built up the semantic capability to outdo other players in this space.

Our differentiation is already in front of you. If you run some ‘conversational’ searches, you can see the results we produce vis-a-vis those of other travel search engines. And with us improving the results every passing day, the future can only be more fun and informational for our users.

Taming the information overload

A survey by travel portal Yatra last month found that three out of five travelers in India go online for booking and itinerary planning, but a fifth of them are overwhelmed by the information overload on the Internet and end up going to traditional travel agents. A related finding was that most travelers now look for meaningful and off-the-beaten-track experiences. A semantic search engine could address these pain points.

On FindmyCarrots, if you search for a “beach within 200 km of Bangalore”, you don’t get a google of options — because in reality there are no beaches in that area. So you only discover beaches as you widen the circle on an interactive map. At around 270 km, you hit the beaches near the former French colony of Auroville in Puducherry on the east coast, and Meenkunnu beach in Kerala on the other side.

“We have to analyze a humongous amount of data to be able to produce this gradually increasing search based on distance information from a place in question, which in this case was Bangalore,” explains Arijit.

A tool for discretionary travelers

FindmyCarrots appeals to discretionary travelers who use the internet to do their own research and find novel experiences. A PhoCusWright report says discretionary travelers account for one-tenth of the US$10 billion Indian online travel market, which resulted in a compounded annual growth rate of 30.6 percent from 2011. More than two-thirds of consumer ecommerce transactions in India relate to online travel currently.

But FindmyCarrots only views the Indian travel market as a launchpad. It had global ambitions right from day one. “We use machine learning and do not curate our content. The technologies we use are linearly scalable and highly available. So, we have all the building blocks needed to scale massively and rapidly,” Arijit says.

The vacation that started it all

Leveraging AWS, Google Analytics and Clicky