Third Launch In A Month: CRED Ventures Into Luxury Travel Space With escapes

Continuing its spree of new launches, fintech major CRED has now ventured into the luxury travel space with CRED escapes. 

Cred escapes is a curated travel platform that offers stays, experiences and ‘other privileges’ for the fintech startup’s customers. These privileges include room upgrades, access to theme parks, spa credits, among others. 

In a statement, the startup said that its users can also redeem their CRED coins for such stays. CRED will also collaborate with travel partners and hotel brands to design travel experiences for the app’s users. It will also partner with ‘seasoned travellers’ to develop short-form video content to spur the usage of the travel vertical and woo more clients.

“CRED escapes is designed to make the travel experience for the creditworthy completely effortless – to ensure that their escapes always feel like one. With handpicked stays, member-exclusive privileges, and endless inspiration, CRED escapes is all you need to discover, plan, and book your perfect getaway,” Abhay Pruthi, head of CRED Commerce, said.

CRED escapes has more than 300 hotels and resorts listed on its platform across 50 destinations. 

The announcement comes at a time when CRED has undertaken a slew of new launches to increase its revenue and curb mounting losses. Last month, the fintech unicorn announced the launch of its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service, called CRED Flash. It also rolled out a tap-to-pay offering for retail payments using credit cards.

It also launched a UPI payment feature on its app in October 2022, a service which has been offered by other digital payments giants for years. The launches are likely part of CRED’s new game plan to shore up revenue and create parallel revenue streams via merchant discount rate (MDR) and interest income. 

The flurry of new vertical launches come at a time when the unicorn’s losses are on the rise. CRED reported a net loss of INR 1,279 Cr in FY22, up 2.4X year-on-year (YoY), while revenue from operations surged 4.4X YoY to INR 393.5 Cr. 

CRED competes with big fintech names such as Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay across different offerings, but it caters to only a small chunk of high credit score users. 

With the launch of the luxury travel vertical, CRED could be looking at a piece of the pie of the traveltech industry, which is dominated by players such as MakeMyTrip, EaseMyTrip, Yatra, among others.

As per a report, the luxury tourism market in India generated a revenue of $13 Bn in 2022 and is projected to grow to a size of $18 Bn by 2024.