On the whole, for the July-August period, the average air travel demand for domestic flights fell by 9 %, while that for international travel fell by 6% as compared to the peak April-June period, showed the data. Travel demand from women traveling solo, though, went up. Travel demand from the solo women category of travellers between July and September was up by 19 % as compared to the April-June period. The demand is not merely for air travel, but for other modes of transportation as well. When compared to the same period last year, that is July-September 2022, the growth in demand from solo women was 22 % , while, when compared to the Jan-March, the growth was 46 % . The percentage of women travelling solo on international routes was quite low though with this category accounting for 1.56 % of travellers in Q1 and 1.71 % in Q2. In Q3, July to September, that is, the percentage of solo women travelling to international destinations went up to 4.67 %.
Within India, the popular non-metro destinations among solo women were Gurugram, Goa and Chandigarh. The average booking window among solo women travellers during this quarter was 6 days for domestic and 27 days for international travel. Solo women travellers’ length of stay was 10 % more than family travellers, the company said. Also when compared to Q2, on the general as a whole, the average advance booking window for all categories of travelers went up by 3 days, both for domestic and international travel.
When it comes to family travel trends, in the July to September quarter, the advance booking window for this category of travelers was 11 days more than that for general travellers when it came to domestic flights. That is, during the July-September period, if the average advance booking window for booking domestic flights was, say, for instance, 7 days, then when it came to people travelling with families it was 7 plus 11, that is 18 days. Similarly, for international travel, people traveling with families booked their tickets 7 days ahead of the average advance booking window. The new preferred destinations for those travelling with families were Srilanka and Sharjah. As for hotel stays, the average length of the stay for families was 9 % (domestic) and 20 % (international) more than in 2022.