How market leader MakeMyTrip has changed the travel game

Just half a dozen years ago, MakeMyTrip was a B2C website selling air tickets and hotels to Indians. Since then, it has entered corporate bookings, created holiday packages and partnered to help travel agents.

It has also moved aggressively abroad from where it already garners about a quarter of its revenue. In a detailed interview, CMO and CBO Raj Rishi Singh explains the imperatives behind this big transformation.

Find the excerpts below. For the full conversation, click here to visit YouTube.

Sreekant Khandekar: You have been with MakeMyTrip for almost seven years. How has the company changed during this while?

Raj Rishi Singh: Before Covid, we were essentially a B2C business with two dominant products: flights and hotels. That was when Rajesh (Magow, the CEO) had this vision that we should be a multi-offering business.

Why were we limiting ourselves to only the B2C use case? We should solve for businesses. We should solve for travel agents. Luckily for me, I joined when we were thinking about this transformation.

We now have a very large corporate business where corporates as well as SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises) can book. We have a MyPartner product for travel agents. We've also expanded beyond India.

The UAE has become the second most important market for us after India. We have just launched in Saudi Arabia. In the UAE, we've become the largest OTA (Online Travel Aggregator). From an offering point of view, we've kind of added so many of them that we have almost done whatever we had envisaged.

Our earlier approach, with a transactional attitude, was the more difficult way. We’d acquire a consumer for a flight or hotel and re-acquire him again the next time.

Sreekant Khandekar: MakeMyTrip seems to have changed across almost every dimension. Between 2023 and 2025, you’ve grown from roughly $600 million to almost $1 billion in revenue. When you have that kind of growth and change, isn’t it difficult to manage growth?

Raj Rishi Singh: Actually, no. Our earlier approach, with a transactional attitude, was the more difficult way. We’d acquire a consumer for a flight or hotel and re-acquire him again the next time. That kind of a P&L is difficult to manage because the cost of acquisition is high and the margin of profit is very thin.

The way we've started thinking now is that we have not acquired a transaction; we have acquired a consumer. So, if someone books a flight, we know he will need a hotel and also a cab. In some way, this has eased things for us. We also get a lot of organic repeats as a consequence.

Sreekant Khandekar: It is one thing that you are taking a more holistic view, but consumers are always scouting for the best travel deal. How do you make your new approach work?

Raj Rishi Singh: That's a great question. I would say the Indian consumer at large is value-based rather than deal-based: the deal is a way via which he seeks value.

Sreekant Khandekar: Could you distinguish between the two?

Raj Rishi Singh: When we take a transactional view, we feel the need to offer a deal because we believe he is going to come only once. When we offer value, we believe the customer will come exploring every time. We’ll get beaten at times because someone else will give a great deal, but the customer will use us as the primary search platform over time. It is like the philosophy of Walmart: ‘everyday low pricing’.

Sreekant Khandekar: Would you say that your strategic priorities have changed?

Raj Rishi Singh: Our priorities have not changed; they have got more refined. Our strategic priority of ensuring that Indians book travel online hasn’t changed. Despite being in the market for 25 years now, we still have headroom to move Indians from offline to online. That is still a large opportunity.

What’s changed is the way we view our business and the way we think about the problem that MakeMyTrip is trying to solve.

Sreekant Khandekar: Have consumer attitudes towards travel changed a lot in recent years?

Raj Rishi Singh: The answer is: absolutely yes. But first, let’s look at the big picture. Although India is a large country, only around 60 million households have the income to spend on travel. And for the top 20-30 million households out of them, travel is now becoming an essential category. They are saying, ‘I have to spend on travel.’ So, there is a large attitudinal shift.

In fact, when we survey first-time earners, travel comes out among the top three categories they would want to spend on. Surprisingly, categories like housing and automobiles come far below things like health, travel and eating out.

Sreekant Khandekar: How fascinating. Looking at the way the competitive landscape has evolved, do you come up against different rivals in different segments – for example, in flights or hotels and so on?

Raj Rishi Singh: Correct, we have different brands competing with us in different aspects of travel. For international hotels, Booking is a good competitor. Airbnb is a good competitor. We absolutely respect competition because we get to learn from them things that we couldn’t have learnt organically.

However, I dare say that we aren't very competition-focused. That’s because, considering the way the India travel pie is expanding, there's so much headroom to grow that there's space for everyone.

Sreekant Khandekar: Considering how fast MakeMyTrip has grown between 2023 and 2025, doesn’t that put pressure on profitability?

Raj Rishi Singh: Actually, the reverse is true because our fixed costs like people and hosting data are significant. So, the more transactions we do, the better for us.

Also, more consumers basically means more learning on the platform. Whether these people book with us or not, we have identified them and are able to use machine learning to craft journeys for them.

Then, instead of doing a mass media campaign to acquire them, we can run a very personalised campaign because we know he was looking for a hotel in Goa in August.

That I think is the bigger play. The more first-party data you aggregate on the platform, the more you are able to improve your own learning and acquire the same consumer at a far lower cost than you would have if you were a small platform. Roughly 20% of our business every quarter comes from new users who have never booked on MakeMyTrip before.

Sreekant Khandekar: Where are all these new users coming from? And are their needs different from the regulars on MakeMyTrip?

Raj Rishi Singh: It's quite democratic in the sense that they all come from urban India, our main focus. We remain over-indexed on the top 20 cities even for new users because those are the consumers who become affluent faster. They are first jobbers.

Are they different in terms of buying behaviour with the same income cohort? The answer is no because they are digital natives.

They understand the digital world far, far better than the previous generations. They are more savvy – but less loyal.

Sreekant Khandekar: Is this simply an aspect of lower brand loyalty among young consumers?

Raj Rishi Singh: I have a hypothesis that the newer users do not have emotional loyalty, but they do have functional loyalty. Running emotional brand campaigns is not going to bring them back. But if I can form muscle memory that says this brand solves my use case best, they may return. With them, functional benefit works better than emotional connect.

We mistakenly think that functional benefit means only cheaper pricing. It can be much more. Functional benefit can also mean that, say, I am going to Shimla; can you show me a hostel which is better suited to my needs than another? So, can you help them in their travel discovery in a more unique way? Can you help them find new places? So, I think it's also about that. It's not about just pricing.

Sreekant Khandekar: Could this be driven by social media? A different place in Shimla means a different experience and a different picture that I can share with my friends?

Raj Rishi Singh: Absolutely – social media is one of the large drivers. Travel is about discovery. Additionally, today, our personality is not just who we are but how it is augmented via social media. I am what I am, plus I am also how my social feed looks.

Sreekant Khandekar: I tried one of your holiday packages earlier this year. I was sceptical about how a large company could help personalise my experience. But it all turned out well. So, two questions: One, are holiday packages a big business for you? And two, how does a company specialising in online aggregation create personalised experiences using telecallers?

Raj Rishi Singh: It is not amongst our largest offerings from a revenue point of view. However, it is as big as that of any other company offering holiday packages.

So your question is absolutely right: holiday packages demand a very soft touch compared to some of our other offerings.

Whichever business – be it holiday packages or our corporate bookings – requires a different DNA, we give them a dedicated tech product and business bandwidth and let them find their own path. These teams are independent and run by an SBU lead (Strategic Business Unit). The unit is a little culturally different, too, from one having a purely online play.

Sreekant Khandekar: You spoke about your international expansion. Why now? Why not invest those same resources within India?

Raj Rishi Singh: India remains the priority market for us. We would always prioritise India over anything else.

Actually, we wanted to tap into the 30 million affluent Indian households who live outside the country. Many in the UAE and the US as well have gone to work and will return. Our starting point was to address all these Indian households because they have an affinity for MakeMyTrip.

In the UAE, the adoption rate was extremely fast, and once people from the subcontinent started transacting on MakeMyTrip UAE, we had the revenues to spend on acquiring other nationalities and on building an Arabic platform.

Sreekant Khandekar: Coming to AI: how is that changing the game for you?

Raj Rishi Singh: AI is now taken as generative AI, but we have been solving a lot of use cases with AI and ML (machine learning) even earlier. But over the past year or so, people have been conversing with AI and getting answers, and that’s been a true disruption.

We are still at an early stage, but right now AI is helping us boost productivity. Today, if you want to make a flight booking by just talking to the app, you can do it. So, we are working on the low-hanging fruit.

The big question ahead, I think, is: where do consumers search for travel?

Till now Indians would search either on Google – where we would insert search ads – or would come to us. But if people are now searching on OpenAIor Perplexity, how do we get into the process? Those are things we are thinking about, but not alone. We are working closely with Google and Microsoft.

Sreekant Khandekar: On to my last question: has the role of advertising and the media mix you use changed a lot in recent years?

Raj Rishi Singh: Advertising remains very important for us. Even the most affluent households travel at best once a quarter. That’s all the opportunity we have. It is not every week.

We monitor MakeMyTrip’s mental and physical availability. When you think of travel, is MakeMyTrip top of mind? That’s mental availability. And second, when you are trying to book, is our app installed on your mobile phone? That’s the physical bit.

I think media planning is what we have changed the most. There are multiple channels available, and marketers have further complicated their lives by talking of top-funnel and bottom-funnel marketing. Then there’s performance marketing.

In the last couple of years we have tried to collapse everything and say, ‘There’s nothing called top-funnel marketing or bottom-funnel marketing.’

We need to talk to the consumer at multiple points in time: we must talk to him differently when he is not looking to travel. And when he is in the market to travel, the content must be very different: it has to be specific, and it should ultimately lead him to the app.

When he's not in the market, the content must be such that he loves watching it. It must make such an impression that he should decide to try out MakeMyTrip next time.