chennai after a twoyear lull indians are travelling with a vengeance in recent months and a large portion of this revenge travel action is being undertaken through smartphonesdata sourced from apps tracker dataai formerly appannie shows that out of the 148 billion app downloads worldwide across ios and google play stores during januarymay 2022 in the travel category india held the lions share of 15 with over 220 million travel app downloads the highest out of all regions on a yearonyear basis the downloads of travel apps in india rose by 104 during this period compared to january to may 2021in terms of growth in new installs of airline apps emirates goindigoin air india apps recorded the highest yoy growth during januarymay 2022 at 425 119 and 25 respectively dataai analysis pegged cleartrip to be one of the most downloaded booking apps with a 4000 growth in downloads and bookingcom downloads grew 52when it comes to usage of the apps british airways 194 united airlines 142 and emirates 55 were the airline apps that recorded maximum monthovermonth increases in monthly active users in may cleartrip 47 agoda 29 wego 22 were the integrated travel service apps that saw the largest jumps in monthly active users in mayacross the board the analysis shows that consumers are looking forward to traveling amidst easing of lockdown restrictions despite inflation worries dataai analyst vincent zhou said the total time spent by consumers on apps also suggests people are looking for ways to save money while continuing to prioritize travel he added talking about global travel apps travel portal easemytrip told toi that their app is one of the highestrated ota apps currently the traffic between the app and portal is quite similar where customers enjoy the hasslefree interface of easemytrip services and offers we are witnessing a jump of more than 30 in bookings on a monthonmonth basis where goa himachal pradesh and rajasthan have emerged as the most preferred destinations for leisure travel in india for international travel dubai thailand and maldives are the favourite places right now the company saida spokesperson for cleartrip said the company has seen a significant amount of pentup demand for travel and indians have shown interest in visiting domestic destinations such as goa jaipur srinagar kerala himachal pradesh leh and sikkim we saw a 3x increase in hotel bookings in the first quarter while domestic air bookings increased by 10 and international bookings increased by 7 we also saw a stabilisation in hotel bookings month on month the spokesperson saidinsurtech startup digit insurance said in the first four months of 2022 the company has already sold 75 of the total number of travel policies it sold throughout fy21 this could well be an indication of more indians finally getting on to that flight but with the necessary insurance cover the company said