Peter Fankhauser, CEO of the Thomas Cook Group

Thomas Cook (India) Group, India’s leading integrated travel and travel related financial services company, witnessed aggressive growth in holiday uptake during the Diwali festive season, with a surge of 30% for its domestic tours and 26% for its international destinations.

Thomas Cook India’s internal data had revealed a significant and growing trend of Indians preferring to travel rather than stay at home during key festivals. To capitalize on this trend, the Company launched a series of attractive packages and value offers, which when coupled with airline deals, served well to catalyze consumer demand.

Asia short hauls and visa-on-arrival destinations ranked on top of the leader-board; Thomas Cook India’s Asia Group Tours seeing a surge of over 30%, compared to the same period of 2016. Favoured destinations included Singapore, Thailand, Bali, Malaysia and Japan. Additionally, favourites like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jordan and Egypt showed high demand this year.

Diwali and card parties are almost synonymous and interestingly, the Company’s tours to Macau with casino experiences saw a spike of 20%. Long haul destinations that featured well in Thomas Cook’s Festive growth story included Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

From a Domestic perspective, Thomas Cook India recorded strong demand with destinations like Andamans, Bhutan, the Rann of Kutch-Gujarat, Rajasthan, Goa, Nepal, Coorg and Kerala’s backwaters.

A clear trend witnessed this season was of Indians clubbing festive holidays with long weekends, resulting in “extended stays.” A traditional 5 nights overseas tour saw an extension to 8-9 nights. Accordingly, spends also rose substantially from an average Rs 1 Lakh to Rs 1.2 lakhs per person for an all-inclusive tour.