Following the news that Amazon has formed a partnership with travel portal Cleartrip to launch a domestic flight booking feature through Amazon Pay in India, Shagun Sachdeva, Consumer Insights Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers her view:

“Amazon’s collaboration with Cleartrip to facilitate flight booking services is in line with Amazon’s growing interest in expanding its payment service in India, which Amazon considers  to be one of the fastest growing markets. It’s a strategic move that benefits both companies as Amazon can expand the domestic flight booking capability with Amazon Pay, enabling customers to do more with the Amazon app, earn cashbacks and more savings due to low cancellation fees; as well as creating added value for its prime members. Cleartrip, on the other hand, can leverage on Amazon’s huge consumer base of around 150 million to drive online bookings in travel services.

“The partnership has come at a time when consumers’ buying behaviour is evolving and they are increasingly showing openness to the online sales channel. Other players such as Flipkart’s payment unit PhonePe and Ola are also leveraging on the super app trend by scaling up their presence in the online service sector. In April last year, Flipkart announced its strategic partnership with MakeMyTrip to foray into the online travel aggregator space.

“Amazon India’s partnership with Cleartrip will undoubtedly bring it one step closer to its dream of becoming a super app. Seven years ago Amazon entered the Indian market with a clear ambition to become an aggregator of apps. Given that Amazon is attempting to emulate WeChat’s business model based on integration of multiple categories such as payments, shopping, food delivery, among others within its messaging app, it is hunting ground to create a platform enabling end-to-end fulfillment for customers and allowing them to make various kinds of transactions ranging from food, cabs, hotel stays, to flight bookings.”