In India’s $23 bn online travel market, Ixigo turns to AI and cricket to gain ground

Online travel agency Ixigo is employing artificial intelligence and strategic brand partnerships to take on formidable competition in India's rapidly expanding online travel market, where the company operates across flights, trains, buses, and hotels through its multi-brand portfolio. 

The Indian online travel market is estimated at approximately $23.1 billion in 2025, with forecasts indicating robust growth to $33.9 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 7.76%, according to Mordor Intelligence. 

This growth trajectory has been underpinned by dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour post the pandemic, with OTAs and airlines witnessing app downloads surge by 92% and 84% year-on-year, respectively, in 2022, surpassing pre-COVID levels and demonstrating renewed travel confidence.

The momentum continued into 2023, with OTA cohort downloads increasing 26% year-on-year whilst airline downloads grew 7%, as per Sensor Tower data. This sustained growth has intensified competition across the sector, with established players such as MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Cleartrip, and newer entrants battling for market share through increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies. 

Operating through distinct verticals, including Ixigo Flight, Ixigo Trains and ConfirmTkt for railways, and AbhiBus for bus travel, Ixigo is betting on innovative AI-powered campaigns, IPL associations, vertical-specific brand positioning, and strategic celebrity partnerships that resonate with India's diverse travel demographics.

afaqs! spoke to the brand to get the gist of its marketing strategy and its priorities for expansion going forward.

Recent marketing initiatives

The brand's marketing trail for the last six months has been a mix of creativity and technology to cut through marketplace noise. For instance, the travel platform's 18th anniversary campaign earlier this month extensively leveraged AI for a series of ad films.

"The campaigns creatively reimagined the 'Kabir ke Dohe' into travel-themed messages and were produced entirely using generative AI tools like Google Veo 3 for visuals, voice and editing. We saw a fantastic response to this. The innovation in execution got us a lot of social media buzz, and this effectively marked a shift towards product-driven content creation," explains Manan Bajoria, group VP of growth, product marketing and analytics at Ixigo.

Moreover, the brand was also very active during the IPL 2025, extending partnerships with multiple teams to drive brand awareness and performance. AbhiBus secured official bus travel partner status with Chennai Super Kings for the 2025 T20 season, whilst ConfirmTkt renewed its partnership with Royal Challengers Bangalore. 

These partnerships extended beyond traditional sponsorship, with Ixigo launching innovative real-time offers during IPL matches.

"Every four or every six that got hit, you could get 40% off for four minutes and 60% off for one minute. So that coupon code would go live as soon as a boundary or a six gets hit, and the users would have that short time window to avail that offer," Bajoria explains.

Interestingly, Ixigo has strategically positioned its sub-brands to dominate specific transport verticals, instead of marketing them under one blanket identity of the group. Each of Ixigo's brands retains a distinct market identity, such as the Ixigo main app, ConfirmTkt for railway bookings, and AbhiBus for bus travel, each with dedicated mobile applications.

Bajoria says that the approach is rooted in consumer perception and category leadership.

“For instance, in the bus booking segment, the brand AbhiBus enjoys high recall and is already well-established,” he says.

“Ixigo, on the other hand, is more strongly associated with train travel, especially through the Ixigo Trains and Confirm Ticket brands.”

By leveraging the distinct strengths and recognition of each brand in their respective categories, Ixigo aims to go aggressive where the fit is strongest. The same logic applies to flights, which the company plans to grow separately under the ‘Ixigo Flights’ brand.

The company holds market leadership in trains after IRCTC, demonstrating the effectiveness of its railway-focused sub-brands.

"Within trains, we are already the market leader after IRCTC. Among all the other OTAs, we sell the most number of tickets," Bajoria notes.

In buses, the company holds the second position, whilst in flights, it occupies third place in the competitive hierarchy, as per Bajoria.

Geographically, Ixigo's strength varies significantly between urban tiers. The company maintains a particularly strong presence in tier-two and tier-three cities through its train platform.

"For flights, the tier one audience is where we are focusing a lot more. The Ixigo brand awareness is very strong in tier two and tier three towns due to the Trains app. For example, Lucknow is the biggest city where we get the maximum number of users on our train app," Bajoria explains.

Digital-heavy media strategy

The company's media allocation strategy reflects its new-age positioning and target audience behaviour patterns.

"At an overarching level, our media strategy is built around purposeful storytelling combined with tech-enabled efficiency and audience relevance. We are definitely more digital-heavy versus traditional media, given that the brand as such is a new-age brand and the audience that we are trying to target is also spending a lot more time on digital versus traditional," Bajoria reveals.

Within digital channels, the company prioritises performance marketing over programmatic advertising, with strategic brand campaign placements on platforms like YouTube and Jio Hotstar during cricket matches to maximise reach amongst target audiences.

This approach allows Ixigo to achieve cost-effective customer acquisition whilst building brand awareness in highly engaged contexts.

On celebrities and influencers

Ixigo's celebrity partnership strategy prioritises product functionality over generic brand promotion. The company onboarded Rohit Sharma as brand ambassador for Ixigo Trains, featuring him in an unexpected avatar as a ticketman to highlight comprehensive app features.

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A post shared by Rohit Sharma (@rohitsharma45)

Similarly, partnerships with celebrities like Soha Ali Khan promoted specific product features such as Flight Tracker Pro, which provides comprehensive flight information, including terminal details, boarding gates, and baggage belt numbers.

The company's influencer marketing strategy prioritises meaningful partnerships over broad-based associations.

"We do collaborations that are meaningful and aligned with the values and what our brand stands for. We don't do a lot of broad brand associations, we focus on niche partnerships that resonate deeply with our audience, whether it's promoting women's empowerment, celebrating family bonds or enabling smart travel choices," Bajoria says.

AI is becoming increasingly important

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a cornerstone of Ixigo's marketing toolkit, enabling unprecedented efficiency in content creation and campaign deployment. The AI adoption journey has evolved comprehensively across content formats.

"AI now plays a huge role. Initially, we started with just the text content, so we were generating ad headlines and ad copies when the whole AI thing took off in the initial days. Then, when we saw image models also improving at a rapid pace, we could generate a lot of ad creatives on the fly with ten different variations of any single theme," Bajoria notes.

The transformation extends to video content, with the company now capable of producing complete video advertisements within single-day turnarounds. "We started with text, moved on to images, and now videos," he adds.

This technological advantage delivers substantial cost savings compared to traditional production methods, whilst enabling rapid campaign iteration and testing.

Consumer trends

The OTA executive identifies significant shifts in consumer behaviour patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic, with leisure travel experiencing unprecedented growth.

"We are definitely seeing a huge boom when it comes to travel, especially post-COVID. People do want to spend money and they want to experience travel and not just have that checklist that they've been to X number of places," Bajoria observes.

This behavioural transformation has influenced destination preferences, with travellers increasingly opting for international destinations over traditional domestic locations.

"We are also seeing some shift in travellers preferring a lot more international destinations versus homegrown destinations such as Goa, which is still definitely big. But a lot of people are also preferring international destinations because many of these have become visa-free. The hotel rates are cheaper than what you would get for a good property in Goa nowadays," he explains.

The premiumisation trend has also impacted domestic hospitality pricing, with four-star and five-star hotel prices, particularly luxury properties, experiencing significant increases over the past five years, further driving the international destination preference among cost-conscious premium travellers.

Expansion plans target multi-vertical growth

Looking ahead, Ixigo's expansion strategy focuses on strengthening market position across all four operational verticals—flights, trains, buses, and hotels. The company aims to bridge the gap in flight bookings to achieve the second position, whilst maintaining and expanding its leadership in the trains segment.

Hotels represent a particular growth opportunity, having been launched within the past eighteen months.

The vertical focuses on inventory expansion and funnel optimisation to ensure product quality meets user expectations. Cross-selling opportunities among Ixigo's extensive user base present significant potential for hotels business growth, as per Bajoria.

"We have lakhs of bookers that are booking every day, whether it's a flight or a train or a bus. Those are the lowest-hanging fruits for us when it comes to cross-selling hotels. So the goal there is to cross-sell to a good percentage of bookers," Bajoria explains.

The geographic expansion strategy prioritises tier-one audience development for flights, where brand awareness remains relatively weak despite strong performance in tier-two and tier-three markets through the trains platform.