MMarket ResearchIndia

Industry expertise

Hospitality & Tourism market research in India

Guest experience, demand and destination research for hotels and travel brands.

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Quick answer

Market Research India is a specialist hospitality & tourism research consultancy in India. We interview guests, travel agents, corporate travel managers in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, with field teams in 50 cities and 4 methods matched to how this sector actually buys.

  • Proposal in 24 hours

    Scoped, itemised and fixed-fee.

  • 50 cities, 14 languages

    Our own supervised field teams.

  • Senior-led, NDA-first

    A research director on every project.

2,400+

Projects delivered

50

Cities with field teams

30

Industries covered

14

Indian languages

01

The decisions we help you make

Indian hospitality demand now arrives from three different places — the travel platform, the corporate rate card and the wedding planner — and each values something different. Occupancy hides which of them is actually carrying the property.

  • What do business travellers expect?

  • How do guests choose a hotel?

  • Where is leisure demand growing?

  • Which segment should the rate strategy be built around in this market and season?

  • What would move a corporate account from a competitor's rate card to yours?

Each of these is a decision with a cost attached, which is why we design backwards from them rather than forwards from a questionnaire.

02

Who we talk to, and how we reach them

A sample is only as good as the definition behind it. Here is how each of these groups is found, screened and verified before anyone asks them a question.

  • Guests

    Recruited from post-stay lists with your permission and from independent traveller panels, screened on trip purpose, booking channel and spend band, with competitors' guests deliberately included.

  • Travel agents

    Sampled from IATA and regional agent associations, screened on bookings handled per month and on the mix of leisure, corporate and MICE business.

  • Corporate travel managers

    Approached by name at companies with meaningful travel spend, screened on policy ownership, annual room nights and the supplier-review cycle.

Interviews run in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, with every questionnaire translated and back-translated before fieldwork. Moderators and interviewers are briefed on the hospitality & tourism category itself, not handed a script — which is the difference between a respondent answering politely and a respondent explaining themselves.

04

What a typical study looks like

Indicative, not fixed — but close enough to budget against before you have written a brief.

Indicative scope — hospitality & tourism study

Typical sample
n=800 guests across 6 properties and their competitive set, 60 agent interviews and 25 corporate travel-manager depths
Who we interview
Guests, Travel agents, Corporate travel managers — each recruited against a separate screener rather than drawn from one general sample.
Core methods
Customer Satisfaction & NPS, Mystery Shopping, B2B Market Research, Competitor Analysis
Fieldwork window
4–6 weeks, covering both peak and shoulder season
Standard deliverables
NPS dashboard, Driver analysis, Action plans, Scorecards
Signature output
A segment-by-season rate and service priority map
Lead time
7–9 weeks from sign-off to debrief

05

Compliance, ethics and data quality

Research in this sector carries obligations that a generic fieldwork house will not have thought about. These are the ones we build into the protocol before the first interview is scheduled.

  • Guest privacy respected

    Guests are never approached in rooms or corridors. Intercepts happen in public areas after check-out, and no room number or folio detail is recorded.

  • Review integrity

    We never solicit, write or shape online reviews as part of a study. Satisfaction research and reputation management stay separate.

  • Negotiated rates kept confidential

    Corporate rate information is reported as indexed ranges, never as a named account's figures.

  • Verification you can audit

    Every guest and corporate travel manager we count is screened against a written definition, de-duplicated, GPS- and timestamp-logged in the field, and re-contacted on a 10% back-check with 10% of audio audited by a supervisor who did not run the interview.

What we will not do on a hospitality & tourism study

We will not substitute an audience without telling you, quietly loosen a screener to hit a quota, interview anyone who has not understood what they are consenting to, or move identifiable personal data outside India without your written agreement. If the fieldwork cannot be done properly, we say so at proposal stage rather than at debrief.

How we work

Our research process

  1. 01

    Discovery

    We turn your business question into clear research objectives.

  2. 02

    Design

    Sampling, method, questionnaire and discussion guides, translated into local languages.

  3. 03

    Fieldwork

    Supervised field teams with GPS, audio and back-check quality control.

  4. 04

    Analysis

    Statistical and thematic analysis by senior researchers.

  5. 05

    Insight

    Board-ready reports, dashboards and workshops with clear recommendations.

Before you brief us

Frequently asked questions

What does a hospitality & tourism research project cost in India?

Cost follows the sample, the seniority of the audience and the number of cities. Reaching guests costs a fraction of what it costs to reach corporate travel managers, so the audience mix moves the number far more than the headline interview count. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

Which cities should a hospitality & tourism study cover?

Start where the sector concentrates — Jaipur, Aurangabad, Madurai, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram — then add markets that match your distribution rather than the national map. Most clients run four to eight cities so results can be compared side by side.

How do you make sure respondents are genuinely travel agents?

Each audience has its own written screener and its own frame. Respondents are de-duplicated against past projects, fieldwork is GPS- and timestamp-logged, 10% are re-contacted on a back-check and 10% of audio is audited by a supervisor who did not conduct the interview.

How long does a hospitality & tourism study take?

Fieldwork of the scope described above runs 4–6 weeks, covering both peak and shoulder season, and the whole project is typically 7–9 weeks from sign-off to debrief. Fieldwork usually begins five to seven working days after sign-off, once screeners and translations are approved.

Which methods suit hospitality & tourism research best?

For this sector we most often use customer satisfaction & nps, mystery shopping, b2b market research, competitor analysis. The right combination depends on whether you need to size something, explain it or test it — a brief that names the decision gets a sharper design than one that names a method.

What safeguards apply to hospitality & tourism fieldwork?

Guests are never approached in rooms or corridors. Intercepts happen in public areas after check-out, and no room number or folio detail is recorded. Alongside that, all personal data is collected on informed consent, held in India, pseudonymised before analysis and deleted on an agreed schedule, in line with the DPDP Act, 2023 and the ESOMAR code.

Request a proposal

Tell us the hospitality & tourism decision you are facing and we will scope it.

Sector at a glance

Hub cities
17
Audiences covered
3
Fieldwork window
4–6 weeks
Lead time
7–9 weeks
Proposal
Within 24 hours
See related case studies

Keep exploring

Hospitality & Tourism research, city by city and method by method

Fifty cities, twenty methods and the sectors that sit closest to hospitality & tourism. Each page is written for that specific combination of market and approach.

Tier 1 metros

8

Full-scale quantitative fieldwork, viewing-facility groups and senior hospitality & tourism interviews in the eight largest markets.

Sectors that sit next to this one

4

These most often appear in the same programme as a hospitality & tourism study, either as an adjacent market or a shared audience.

Next step

Make your next hospitality & tourism decision with evidence.

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