Travel and Hospitality Consumer Research in India: Reaching the Right Travellers

SuperJ members are general Indian consumers, so people who travel are among them. No traveller field is documented, so ask which behavioural segments exist and always screen.

Targeting. Select the cities where your travellers live, which is not where they travel. The fields are set out in how audience targeting works and the guide to surveying any audience.

Cells. The screener sorts people into leisure, business, domestic and international groups. Use in-survey over-quota routing to close a cell when it fills, so frequent travellers do not crowd out occasional ones. Ask the team which screener answers can carry a quota.

Use a recall window of 12 months. Shorter windows cut incidence for business and international trips.

Question 3 matters most for business travel. If an employer's desk books everything, the traveller cannot answer price or channel questions, so a screen-out is right. Ask for the trip purpose before the booking channel, so the two answers are not anchored on each other.

For one real use of a smartphone audience in this category, read the hotel booking app ad pre-test. It was a directional 100-person test of a video ad, so read it as a method example, not a market figure. For churn and satisfaction work, see the guides on customer experience and churn.

These come from the Ministry of Tourism's India Tourism Data Compendium 2025, which we opened.

Domestic trips are the bulk. The compendium reports 2,948.19 million domestic tourist visits in 2024, up 17.51% from 2,508.82 million in 2023. Uttar Pradesh (646.81 million) and Tamil Nadu (306.84 million) were the top two states by visits. These are visits to states, not people. Do not read them as a count of travellers.

Outbound is smaller but growing. Indian nationals made 30.89 million departures in 2024, 10.79% above 2023. By purpose, 42.52% were leisure, 34.69% were visits related to the Indian diaspora, 14.92% business and professional, and 3.99% pilgrimage. The United Arab Emirates was the leading destination, and 98.00% departed by air. Business was under a sixth of departures, so expect international business travellers to be hard to fill. Departures are trips, not people.

Inbound is a different study. Foreign tourist arrivals were 99.52 lakh in 2024 (Ministry of Tourism, PIB, 11 December 2025). Our panel is Indian residents on a smartphone app, so it cannot survey foreign visitors.

Cancellation and refunds are regulated. The DGCA's Civil Aviation Requirement on refunds (Section 3, Series M, Part II) says airlines must complete a refund within 21 working days for tickets bought through a travel agent or portal. It also describes a 48-hour look-in option for changes. That copy is dated 2008 and marked February 2019, so check the current version before you quote terms in a questionnaire.

Illustrative study: booking-channel and price sensitivity among travellers who book their own trips. You want 400 completes: 280 leisure travellers and 120 frequent business travellers.

Precision. At 95% confidence and a 50% result, 1.96 × √(0.25 ÷ 280) = 5.9 points for leisure, and 1.96 × √(0.25 ÷ 120) = 8.9 points for business. The business cell is too small to compare finely, which is a trade-off you should decide on purpose.

Incidence. The term is defined in the audience hub guide. These rates are assumptions for the sums, not panel data.

Both cells fill from the same stream. Of 1,500 people entering, about 1,500 × 0.35 = 525 would qualify as leisure, above the 280 needed, so you do not add the two counts. The rare group drives the field effort. If the business cell is too hard to fill, widen the window or the age band before you cut the sample. Ask for the feasibility count for the business cell first.

• Business-traveller feasibility. "How many frequent business travellers who book their own trips, in [cities]? Over what recall window?"

• Trip-based confirmation. "Is traveller status a screener answer on trips in the last 12 months, or an old profile tag?"

• Booking-desk exclusion. "Can the survey screen out people whose employer's desk books everything?"

• International cell. "How do you handle international business travellers if the cell will not fill?"

• Channel cells. "Which screener answers, such as booking channel, can carry a quota?"

• Refund and cancellation wording. "Do you review questionnaire wording on refund terms against current airline rules?"

Generic checks are in verified survey respondents.

People who book only through agents or walk-ins are under-represented, because the panel is smartphone users. The panel is India only, so it cannot reach foreign tourists or Indians who live abroad. Frequent business and international travellers may be slow to fill. Self-reported funnel steps and cancellation reasons are memory, not booking logs, and domestic visit counts from the Ministry are visits, not people, so do not use them as population totals for weighting.

For a booking-channel and price study among smartphone-using Indian travellers, the example above costs this at list price.

Pro is sold in bundles of 400 to 1,000 responses and Enterprise pricing is custom: see pricing. SuperJ has a 25M+ consumer footprint of which the survey-eligible panel is a subset. Verification and quality checks are on the panel methodology page.