Cleartrip Middle East, a leading mobile and online travel company in the region, delivered its strongest quarterly results ever in the fourth quarter of 2017 on the back of a 59 per cent year-on-year increase in bookings in the Mena region.

“We marked a strong finish to 2017 with the best quarterly performance in Cleartrip Middle East’s history. In markets like UAE, we were able to outperform the industry showcasing a multifold expansion. We are particularly delighted to see that our investments toward the adoption of new technologies have started to yield positive results,” said Stuart Crighton, founder and CEO, Cleartrip.

In the UAE, Cleartrip grew four times as much as the overall air industry growth rate, which expanded at about 13 per cent compared to the same Q4 period a year ago. In Saudi Arabia, Cleartrip witnessed a 236 per cent increase in growth, driven by a number of factors including the company’s launch of its Arabic website and continued focus on product innovation.

While India continued to be the strongest route in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the company’s domestic travel segment in the kingdom expanded 25-fold in the last quarter. The UAE witnessed a spike in traffic to the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while the kingdom recorded a substantial growth in traffic to Egypt, the UAE, Pakistan, the Philippines and Turkey.  

“We are optimistic that 2018 will be another strong growth year, and we will continue to drive innovation and leverage technology to diversify and enhance our offerings. With our strong presence in the region and our solid financial credentials, we couldn’t be in a better position to further scale our operations and expand our market footprint. Closely aligned with our long-term growth strategy, we have laid out plans to further deepen our presence in the region, starting with our launch in Egypt later this year,” said Sameer Bagul, execuitve vice president and managing director, Cleartrip.

All booking channels performed well during the quarter, however, mobile was one of the strongest boosted by the company’s investments worth more than $1 million in mobile development over the last year.

“We clearly know that the future is mobile and we will continue to step up our efforts to bolster Cleartrip’s leadership position in this space. We are also working towards introducing 'chat based' booking and service experience to enable our customers to interact with our brand in a more 'natural' manner by cutting out the noise. In addition, we are making significant investments in personalisation using an Artificial Intelligence-based data analytics platform to help us launch new products and features in 2018,” said Bagul. - TradeArabia News Service