India’s summer marketing has a recycling problem. Not the catastrophic kind. The quiet, comfortable kind where nobody gets fired because the campaign technically worked. Every year, as temperatures tip past 40 degrees in Delhi and the air turns into a warm, damp handshake, brands reach for familiar territory. The visuals get a new filter. The insight stays untouched.
The good news is that the Indian traveller has not stood still. And a handful of brands have noticed.
“A large part of the industry is still recycling the ‘escape the heat’ narrative,” says Devendra Parulekar, Founder, SaffronStays. “The real shift is in how travellers are making decisions today. People are no longer waiting for long holidays. They are using weekends to take short breaks from their everyday routines, which makes travel far more purpose-led.”
The weekend break is not new. What is new is the intention behind it. A group booking a large private home in Alibaug is not looking for a destination. They want a place where no one asks them to follow an itinerary and the kitchen is stocked. The stay is the holiday. The destination is almost incidental.
This changes what marketing needs to do. “Escape the heat” sells a location. It does not sell a feeling. And feeling is what the modern Indian traveller is spending for.
Raj Rishi Singh, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Business Officer, MakeMyTrip, cuts through the noise on this. “The Indian summer traveller is not just one audience. They are multiple cohorts. The traveller booking a bus trip to Shimla and the one booking a high-end villa in Coorg are on entirely different journeys: different anxieties, different decision triggers, different proof points they need before they convert.”
One summer campaign for all of India stops making sense at that scale. The brief has to fragment. The media plan has to follow the human, not the season.
Singh goes further on where the real shift sits. “The marketing job has expanded from persuading to assisting, from campaigns to conversations.” Easy discovery, price transparency, flexible cancellations. These are not product features buried in fine print anymore. They are the brand experience itself.
Then there is the airport. India’s most underrated brand environment, and one that is quietly being reimagined.
Sundar Natarajan, Head of Strategy, Communications and Institutional Relations, DigiYatra Foundation, turns the question on its head. “Seamlessness is often mistaken for the absence of personality, but in today’s context, it is the personality. What travellers value most in high-stress environments like airports is speed, certainty, and trust and that trust has to be engineered, not assumed.”
Remove the friction at check-in and boarding and you do not remove the brand moment. You free it up. “When passengers are not preoccupied with queues and document checks, they have more time, headspace, and willingness to interact with the airport ecosystem.”
At 35,000 feet, Akasa Air is reading the same signals. Naarayan T V, Chief Marketing Officer, Akasa Air, says the ground rules have shifted. “Summer travel marketing in India is certainly evolving, but the real shift is being driven by a more discerning and diverse traveller. The conversation is no longer about the cheapest fare; it is about value, relevance, and the overall experience.”
The geography of Indian travel is changing with it. Darbhanga, not Goa, not Shimla, is the story this summer. “Growth is no longer limited to metro-to-metro routes; it is increasingly being powered by travellers from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. For instance, destinations like Darbhanga are witnessing strong demand, with passenger load factors consistently above 90%. At the same time, short-haul sectors and regional connectivity are driving frequency, while international leisure corridors such as Southeast Asia are seeing a notable surge.”
The Indian travel planner has also grown up. Bookings are coming in earlier. Choices are more deliberate. Wallets are opening wider, for convenience, for experience, for the journey itself. “Planning behaviour has also matured. Travellers are booking earlier, are more intentional in their choices, and are willing to spend on convenience and experience rather than just price. This is pushing brands to engage consumers earlier in the decision journey and balance performance marketing with stronger brand building.”
Akasa has responded by building out over 25 ancillary services, from visa assistance to curated holidays. “Customers today are not just buying a flight; they are looking for seamless journeys. At Akasa Air, we have responded to this by curating over 25 ancillary services, from visa assistance to Akasa Holidays, allowing customers to personalise their travel based on their needs.”
Naarayan’s closing thought is the one that every marketing team planning a summer deck should pin to their wall. “While the brief itself may appear familiar, the strategic response cannot be. The brands that are getting it right are those grounded in real consumer insight, moving beyond simply where people want to go, to understanding how they want to feel, and designing the entire experience around that.”
And then there is Bisleri. A brand that does not need to chase summer because summer comes to it.
Tushar Malhotra, Director of Sales and Marketing, Bisleri International, pushes back on the seasonality assumption. “From a sales lens, yes, we do have a seasonality as far as summer is concerned, but it is not as big as carbonated soft drinks. Yes, these are the peak months, but the peak is not that much of a peak. It’s still in line with what we are doing in terms of the business for the rest of the year.”
What Bisleri has built instead is something more structural. Five IPL team associations this season, Sunrisers Hyderabad, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, Kolkata Knight Riders, Punjab Kings, and Rajasthan Royals. Limited edition bottles with player imagery, truck branding, retail POSM, digital content, and a television spot in every match. “It’s on TV, it’s on ground. We’ve got a Bisleri musicooler and icebox on TV as well. It’s present for the next two months.”
Beyond cricket, the brand is reaching into pop culture. Deepika Padukone anchors the Drink It Up campaign. Shahid Kapoor has just come on board for Bisleri Limonata. Rana Daggubati fronts a new campaign around what Malhotra describes as “the good life.” Concerts, trade activations, dealer boards across thousands of outlets. “If you combine all of that together, there’s a lot of action happening this summer for us.”
It is not an escape the heat brief. It is a summer takeover.
What separates the brands getting this right from the ones still on slide nine is not budget. It is not even creativity. It is the willingness to stop treating summer as a media moment and start treating it as a demand occasion, with different consumers, different motivations, and different proof points, all at the same time.
Parulekar brings it back to where the premium conversation is heading. “Brands that are investing in storytelling and not just performance-led campaigns are seeing stronger engagement, especially as demand grows for private, fully equipped stays and domestic destinations.”
The brief has not changed. The consumer has. And every summer, the gap between the two gets a little harder to ignore.
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