New Delhi, Feb 14 (life) Eighty per cent of women travellers are choosing to travel solo every year, while bookings by groups are also growing steadily by 50 per cent year-on-year, highlighted Zostel- a community-led, experience-driven.
Solo travellers - across all genders - made 37 per cent of the total bookings it received in 2019, while 42 per cent of travelers preferred to travel in groups. It also cited millennials and couples (21 per cent) as the top travelers in the past year.
"It makes us incredibly hopeful and even more proud to see so many women taking a leap of faith to explore diverse destinations during solo travels. It validates the path we consciously chose to follow to create a safe and free environment for everyone to experience travel, especially for our female travellers," Dharamveer Singh Chouhan, Co-founder & CEO Zostel said.
The company forecasts a larger number of new-age travelers to prefer short trips to multiple trips, while highlighting the swelling popularity of on-the-go, unplanned longer journeys. This development will be accompanied by a shift towards remote working and freelancing career choices along with an increase in travelers' interaction and engagement with the local community.
Zostel is also anticipating a 150 per cent increase in bookings towards offbeat, new locations in the first year of the new decade and expects this trend to see an upswing for the foreseeable future. The company has also noted an increasing emphasis on multiple Zostel bookings by inbound travelers looking to complete Zostel circuits across the Himalayas, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Kerala in a single trip.
Speaking on the growth expectations, Dharamveer commented: "Millennials and couples comprise the majority of our customers at Zostel. We ended 2019 on an extremely high note with more than 2 lakh bookings registered and we expect our growth momentum to attract even more travelers across all ages in 2020. Seeing that the next generation of chill-seekers is laying increasing focus on experiential traveling, we have decided to boost our portfolio by unlocking deep locations across popular off-beat holiday hubs such as Himachal, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, and Kerala, among others."
(Puja Gupta can be contacted at puja.g@.in)
( With inputs from IANS )