MakeMyTrip

Timeline

1. 2000Deep Kalra founds MakeMyTrip, at first selling travel between the United States and India for the Indian diaspora.the first market was the United States
2. 2005Operations begin in India in September with online airline ticketing.holiday packages and hotels follow
3. 2005The hotel booking business is started, later sold under the MakeMyTrip and Goibibo brands.
4. 2010MakeMyTrip lists on the Nasdaq on 17 September, raising about 80.5 million dollars at a valuation of about 478 million dollars.the first Indian IPO in the United States since July 2006
5. 2011The company buys Luxury Tours and Travel of Singapore, the travel business of the ITC Group and the ETB Group.
6. 2012RoutePlanner, a tool for searching routes and modes of travel inside India, is introduced.
7. 2012Mobile applications are launched for booking travel on a phone.
8. 2014A 15 million dollar innovation fund is set up to invest in travel start-ups.announced in September
9. 2015MyGola is acquired in April through the innovation fund.
10. 2015The company invests in HolidayIQ and picks up about 30 per cent of the travel review portal.
11. 2016Ctrip of China agrees in January to invest 180 million dollars in the company.
12. 2016MakeMyTrip and the Ibibo Group merge in a stock swap, and Naspers becomes the largest shareholder.
13. 2017Hotel supply is pooled across MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, giving the group one hotel inventory.
14. 2019Ctrip raises its stake to 49 per cent after buying about 42 per cent from Naspers.Naspers took a stake in Ctrip instead
15. 2019Quest2Travel, a Mumbai corporate travel management company, is acquired.
16. 2020myPartner, a platform for small travel agents, is launched.
17. 2021A partnership with Amazon Pay makes MakeMyTrip travel services available through Amazon in India.
18. 2022TripMoney, the fintech arm, acquires BookMyForex, an online foreign exchange business.
19. 2023Generative AI features begin to ship, including voice assisted booking in Indian languages.
20. 2024The company agrees to buy Happay, an expense management platform, from CRED.
21. 2025An updated Myra virtual assistant is released and more than 2,000 hotels and homestays near national parks are mapped.
22. 2025MakeMyTrip repurchases over 34 million Class B shares from Trip.com Group, cutting its stake from 45.34 per cent to 16.90 per cent.

What it does

MakeMyTrip Limited is an Indian online travel company headquartered in Gurgaon, in the National Capital Region. It runs a booking platform for airline tickets, hotel and homestay reservations, holiday packages, rail and bus tickets, and travel-related financial services.^[1] The company sells to travellers directly through its own apps and websites, and it also earns from hotels and bus operators through advertising, technology and distribution services that place their inventory in front of those travellers.^[7]

The business is easier to read as a group of brands than as one website. MakeMyTrip is the main consumer site and app, Goibibo is aimed at a younger and more price-sensitive audience and shares hotel supply with MakeMyTrip, redBus is the intercity bus ticketing platform, and TripMoney covers foreign exchange, travel insurance and other travel finance products.^[1] Each brand keeps its own app, its own language and its own promotions, while the hotel supply, the technology and much of the back office sit in one company.^[1]

Revenue comes mainly from hotel and holiday package commissions, air ticketing fees, advertising sold to hotels and airlines, and the distribution services bought by accommodation providers.^[1] Because a large share of Indian travel is still booked offline, the company has invested in franchise shops, a partner programme for small travel agents and a widening hotel supply that reaches homestays and independent properties, all of which exist to move offline demand onto the platform.^[7]

The scale of the group is a function of the size of the Indian travel market and of how much of it has moved online. India sells hundreds of millions of domestic air and rail journeys in a year, and most hotel bookings are still made offline, so even the largest platform is converting an offline market rather than dividing up an online one.^[1] That is why the company reports hotel room nights, air ticketing volumes and app engagement next to its revenue: they are the best available measure of how much offline demand it has moved onto the platform.^[7]

History

MakeMyTrip was founded by Deep Kalra in 2000, and it began by selling itineraries between the United States and India to the Indian diaspora, a customer group that had money, a reason to travel often and no convenient way to book.^[1] The company started operations in India in September 2005 with online airline ticketing, and from there it moved into holiday packages and hotel reservations.^[1] That order of events explains the company's shape: a ticketing business first, and a hotel and packages business that later became the profit centre.^[7]

MakeMyTrip listed on the Nasdaq on 17 September 2010. The initial public offering raised about 80.5 million dollars at a valuation of about 478 million dollars, and it was the first listing by an Indian company in the United States since July 2006.^[1] Nasdaq remains the company's home exchange, which is unusual among Indian consumer internet firms of its generation and gives it access to a deeper pool of global institutional investors.^[9]

The decade after the listing was a run of acquisitions. In 2011 the company bought Luxury Tours and Travel of Singapore, the travel business of the ITC Group and the ETB Group, adding reach in Southeast Asia and parts of Europe.^[1] In 2012 it introduced RoutePlanner for routes inside India and launched its first mobile applications.^[1] In September 2014 it set up a 15 million dollar innovation fund through which it took small stakes in travel start-ups, and in April 2015 it used that fund to buy MyGola, a trip planning service.^[3] In the same year it invested in HolidayIQ, taking about 30 per cent of the hotel review and travel information portal.^[4]

In January 2016 the Chinese travel group Ctrip agreed to invest 180 million dollars, and later that year MakeMyTrip and the Ibibo Group merged in a stock swap that made Naspers the largest shareholder of the combined company.^[1] In 2019 Ctrip raised its stake to 49 per cent by taking about 42 per cent from Naspers, which took a 5.6 per cent stake in Ctrip worth about 1.3 billion dollars instead.^[5] That year the company also bought Quest2Travel, a Mumbai based corporate travel management firm, and in 2020 it launched myPartner for small travel agents.^[1]

In May 2021 Amazon Pay began offering MakeMyTrip travel services inside Amazon in India. In April 2022 TripMoney announced the acquisition of BookMyForex, an online foreign exchange service.^[1] From 2023 the company added generative AI to the platform, including voice assisted booking in Indian languages, and in January 2024 it agreed to buy the expense management platform Happay from CRED.^[1] In 2025 it released an updated Myra assistant, mapped more than 2,000 hotels and homestays near over 100 national parks, and repurchased more than 34 million Class B shares from Trip.com Group, reducing that group's holding from 45.34 per cent to 16.90 per cent.^[1]

Founders and leadership

Deep Kalra founded the company in 2000 and is its best known figure. He had worked in banking and financial services before starting MakeMyTrip, and he led the business from a United States focused ticketing service to the largest travel platform in India and through the Ibibo merger.^[1] He has since moved into a chairman role, and the company's public identity is still tied closely to him.^[1]

Rajesh Magow, a co-founder who joined as the business began scaling in India, has taken on the group chief executive role and runs day to day operations across the brands.^[1] Mohit Kabra, the group chief financial officer, has appeared in the company's investor communications through the years in which it moved from losses to profit.^[1] Because MakeMyTrip lists in the United States, its quarterly filings and earnings calls are the primary public record of how the group is performing.^[9]

The leadership question that has followed the company for years is what the residual stake of Trip.com Group means. After the 2025 buyback the Chinese group held about 16.9 per cent of MakeMyTrip, down from 45.34 per cent, and MakeMyTrip has treated the repurchase as a way to cut the overhang and return control of its own share register to a wider group of investors.^[9] How the reduced foreign stake changes the company's freedom to raise capital or make large acquisitions is one of the things investors watch most closely.^[9]

Flights, hotels and the core business

Air ticketing was the first product and it remains the traffic engine: it is the cheapest way to acquire a traveller, and the relationship it creates is then monetised through hotels, packages and ancillary services.^[1] The hotel and holiday package business is the profit pool. As of 2020 the company listed more than 60,000 accommodation properties in India and about 500,000 outside the country, and the number of Indian properties has grown since with homestays and independent hotels being added to the supply.^[1]

The shift to mobile reshaped the company more than any single acquisition. Mobile applications were launched in 2012 and now account for the large majority of bookings and of customer engagement, which is why promotions, wallet offers and the AI assistant are all designed for the app first.^[1] The Hindu BusinessLine reported on the company's travel application as it became the primary surface through which the brands sell.^[12]

Beyond the consumer app, MakeMyTrip sells through a franchise network and a partner programme. The company had 146 active franchisees as of June 2023, and myPartner gives small travel agents a way to sell MakeMyTrip inventory in towns the company does not reach directly.^[1] Mint has described how the online travel firms in India compete for this ground by expanding into smaller cities and by adding products that offline agents already sold, such as insurance, visas, cabs and foreign exchange.^[7]

redBus and the ground transport business

Bus ticketing is run through redBus, the online bus platform that came to MakeMyTrip with the Ibibo Group. redBus partners with bus operators in India, South America and Southeast Asia, and it gives the group a business that is far less dependent on airlines and airport traffic than the core brand.^[1] For millions of Indian travellers, an intercity bus is the default way to get home, and redBus is the largest digital window onto that market.^[8]

The platform has expanded overseas through acquisitions. Mint reported in 2018 that redBus had acquired a majority stake in the Peru based bus portal Busportal, which was one of the ways the company took its Indian playbook into Latin America.^[8] The overseas bus business is smaller than India in revenue but it is strategically useful, because it uses the same technology and the same operator relationships that redBus built at home.^[8]

Rail and car services fill out the ground side of the platform. The company sells rail tickets and car rentals for airport transfers, local sightseeing and intercity travel, and it packages those with hotels and flights so that a single booking can cover a whole trip.^[1] This bundling is the reason the holiday packages business matters: it is where an air ticket, a hotel and a car are sold together at a margin no single product can reach.^[1]

The Ibibo merger and Goibibo

The merger with the Ibibo Group in 2016 is the single event that made MakeMyTrip the dominant online travel company in India. The Times of India reported the deal as a stock swap that would create a mega online travel company and said Naspers, the South African group that owned Ibibo, would become the largest shareholder of the combined business.^[2] Ibibo brought Goibibo, a fast-moving consumer app, and redBus, the bus platform, into the group.^[1]

The strategy behind the deal was to stop two well funded rivals from bidding up the cost of acquiring the same Indian traveller. Instead of competing for the same hotel and flight customers, the two platforms share hotel supply and split the market by brand, with MakeMyTrip serving a broader audience and Goibibo leaning into deals, gamified offers and a younger customer.^[1]

The merger also brought the group into conflict with hotel aggregators and with hotel owners, because a platform with the largest share of online bookings can press properties on rates and inventory. That tension became formal in the Competition Commission of India's action over price parity clauses, and it remains the central regulatory issue for the company.^[1]

Revenue and financials

MakeMyTrip reports in dollars and its financial year ends on 31 March, so its results are compared with the Indian travel season rather than the calendar year. For the year ended March 2024 the company reported revenue of about 783 million dollars, close to a third higher than the year before, and it has reported profits since the year ended March 2022 after a long stretch of losses.^[1] The turn to profit came from cost discipline, a bigger hotel mix and the scale the Ibibo merger created.^[9]

The mix of that revenue matters more than the headline. Hotel and packages commissions carry a far better margin than air ticketing, so the company pushes travellers toward hotels as soon as an air ticket is booked, and it invests in supply so that the hotel it wants to sell is actually available.^[1] Advertising and the distribution services sold to hotels and bus operators add a second, less cyclical layer of income on top of the transaction commissions.^[1]

Demand is strongly seasonal. The September to December quarter, which covers the festive season, is normally the strongest, and the April to June quarter is the weakest because schools reopen and travel slows.^[7] That seasonality, combined with the fact that a large part of the company's costs are fixed technology and people costs, is why investors read the quarterly numbers as a sequence rather than as stand-alone figures.^[9]

Shareholding, holdings and ownership

MakeMyTrip has been listed on the Nasdaq since 2010 and trades under the ticker MMYT.^[1] Its largest shareholder for most of the last decade has been the Chinese travel group Ctrip, now Trip.com Group, which first invested 180 million dollars in January 2016.^[1]

In 2019 Ctrip raised its stake to 49 per cent by buying about 42 per cent of MakeMyTrip from Naspers in a stock swap, and Naspers received a 5.6 per cent stake in Ctrip worth about 1.3 billion dollars as part of that transaction.^[5] For several years the presence of a large strategic investor, itself an online travel company, was the most discussed feature of the company's share register.^[9]

In 2025 MakeMyTrip repurchased more than 34 million Class B shares held by Trip.com Group and reduced its holding from 45.34 per cent to 16.90 per cent, which left the Chinese group as a sizeable but no longer controlling shareholder.^[9] The buyback removed a governance overhang and shifted the balance of ownership toward global institutional investors, and it is the reason the question of the company's independence is asked less often than it once was.^[9]

Employees and offices

The company's head office is in Gurgaon, in the National Capital Region, and its Wikidata record lists about 3,426 employees.^[1] The workforce has grown with the platform, and MakeMyTrip has also reported a headcount above 4,000 in some years as it added technology, hotel supply and customer support roles.^[1]

Beyond Gurgaon the group runs offices in several Indian cities and teams in the markets where redBus and the international travel business operate, including offices in Southeast Asia and Latin America.^[1] Much of the growth in the Indian operation has come from moving into smaller cities, both through remote roles and through partner and franchise networks that sell as local businesses under the MakeMyTrip and Goibibo brands.^[7]

Technology is the largest single function. Hotel supply, pricing, recommendations, the AI assistant and fraud control all run from engineering teams in India, and the share of the workforce in technology roles has risen as the company automated booking, servicing and reconciliation.^[1]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• Luxury Tours and Travel, a Singapore travel business bought in 2011, one of the first steps into Southeast Asia.^[1]
• The ITC Group travel business, acquired in 2011 to add corporate and leisure travel volume in India.^[1]
• The ETB Group, acquired in 2011, which extended the company's reach into parts of Europe.^[1]
• MyGola, a trip planning start-up acquired in April 2015 through the 15 million dollar innovation fund.^[3]
• HolidayIQ, in which the company took about 30 per cent for about 95 crore rupees in 2015 to strengthen hotel reviews and holiday content.^[4]
• The Ibibo Group, the 2016 stock swap that brought Goibibo and redBus into the company and made Naspers the largest shareholder.^[2]
• Quest2Travel, a Mumbai corporate travel management company acquired in 2019 to grow the business travel segment.^[6]
• BookMyForex, acquired by TripMoney in April 2022, which took the group into online foreign exchange.^[1]
• Happay, an expense management platform that MakeMyTrip agreed to buy from CRED in January 2024, adding spend management for corporate customers.^[1]
• The Amazon Pay partnership, announced in May 2021, which put MakeMyTrip travel services inside the Amazon app in India.^[1]

Competition

MakeMyTrip is the largest online travel agency in India, and its main competitors are EaseMyTrip, Cleartrip, which is owned by Flipkart, Yatra and Ixigo.^[1] Each of them competes on a different axis: EaseMyTrip on low fees and a lean cost base, Cleartrip on its link to the Flipkart shopping audience, Yatra on corporate travel, and Ixigo on a budget and content-led audience.^[1]

The competition that matters most is not another Indian travel site but the airlines and hotels themselves. IndiGo, Air India and the hotel chains all sell directly to travellers and would rather keep the commission, so the online agency has to earn its place by aggregating choice, holding price and taking on customer service.^[7] Global platforms such as Booking.com and Agoda compete for the same hotel bookings, particularly for inbound travellers.^[1]

Mint has reported that the Indian online travel firms compete hard to convert an offline market, with each company spending on brand, discounts and distribution into smaller towns.^[7] In that contest MakeMyTrip's advantage is scale in hotel supply and a multi-brand structure that lets it address two kinds of traveller without confusing either of them.^[1]

The company's defence is the breadth of its supply and the habit it has built inside its app. A traveller who has booked a flight on MakeMyTrip is already logged in when the hotel decision comes, and a hotel that wants that traveller has to be listed on the platform.^[1] Brand spending, the franchise network and the multi-brand structure all exist to hold that position, and every new product, from foreign exchange to expense management, is aimed at earning more from a traveller the company has already paid to acquire.^[1]

Artificial intelligence and Myra

Myra is the company's virtual travel assistant, and it has become the clearest public example of how MakeMyTrip is using artificial intelligence. In 2023 the company began adding generative AI features, including voice assisted booking in Indian languages, and it built those with Microsoft.^[10] The ambition behind the product is straightforward: many Indians are more comfortable speaking a request than typing a long search, so a voice assistant lowers the effort of booking.^[10]

In 2025 the company released an updated version of Myra that handles more than 55,000 daily conversations in multiple Indian languages across the travel booking lifecycle.^[1] The assistant summarises hotel reviews, answers questions about a property and helps a traveller move from an idea to a booking.^[11] Hindustan Times reviewed the assistant and treated it as a genuine attempt to take work out of trip planning rather than as a marketing feature.^[11]

The company also uses AI behind the scenes, in pricing, in the ranking of search results and in customer service, where automated answers resolve a large share of routine queries before a human agent is involved.^[1] That is where the money is: an assistant that handles a booking question is also a way to cut the cost of servicing it.^[1]

Controversies and criticism: the CCI case

The most serious regulatory issue in the company's history is the Competition Commission of India's ruling against price parity clauses in hotel contracts. The commission fined MakeMyTrip and its associated platforms 223 crore rupees, about 23 million dollars, and ordered an end to the clauses that stopped hotels from offering lower rates on their own websites.^[1] The case was brought on complaints from hotel owners, who argued that parity clauses took away their ability to compete on price.^[1]

In March 2026 a United States based short seller, Morpheus Research, alleged that MakeMyTrip had continued to influence hotel prices indirectly through a rebranded price competitiveness score and through deboosting, the practice of burying hotels that do not comply deeper in search results.^[1] The report, which the firm said was based on interviews with more than 100 insiders and hotel executives and with bodies such as the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India, also pointed to parity language that it said had surfaced in a Goibibo contract in August 2025.^[1]

The same report flagged an undisclosed Competition Commission of India investigation opened in March 2024 into a possible hub and spoke arrangement in the hotel market.^[1] MakeMyTrip has disputed the characterisation of its hotel contracts, and the allegations remain allegations, but the pattern is clear: a company with the largest share of Indian online hotel bookings will keep attracting scrutiny over how it uses that share.^[1]

There is a second, more ordinary category of complaint. Travellers have long criticised online travel platforms over misleading discounts, refund delays, unverified listings and the difference between the fare shown at the start of a booking and the fare paid at the end.^[7] MakeMyTrip has responded with clearer fare breakdowns, refund tracking and higher entry standards for hotels, and it has pointed to its customer support volumes as evidence that most bookings complete without a dispute.^[1]

The pandemic and the recovery

The pandemic was the hardest period in the company's history. With borders closed and domestic travel suspended in 2020, bookings collapsed and MakeMyTrip cut costs sharply, including senior salaries, marketing and parts of the workforce, to survive a stretch in which travel revenue in India fell by more than 90 per cent.^[1] The Nasdaq listing and the cash the company had built up over a decade were what carried it through a year in which almost nothing was being bought.^[9]

Recovery began with domestic travel in late 2020 and 2021, and it was led by short breaks, homestays, road trips and visiting friends and relatives rather than by business travel.^[1] Domestic flights and hotel nights came back first, while international travel returned more slowly as air bubbles gave way to scheduled flights and then to full reopening.^[7]

By the year ended March 2024 the company was reporting record revenue and a return to profit, and it described the post-pandemic period as the strongest demand environment it had seen.^[1] The experience changed the product mix: more homestays, more weekend travel, more domestic packages, and a much heavier reliance on the app and on the AI assistant to handle the volume.^[1]

TripMoney and travel finance

TripMoney is the group's financial services arm, selling foreign exchange, travel insurance and other travel-related financial products. Its largest acquisition was BookMyForex, an online foreign exchange platform, bought in April 2022.^[1] Foreign exchange is a natural add-on to the core business: a traveller who has just bought an international ticket needs currency, and selling that currency on the same platform keeps a margin that would otherwise go to a bank or a currency dealer.^[1]

Travel insurance works the same way, bundled into packages and flight bookings so that the traveller buys protection at the moment of purchase rather than shopping for it separately.^[1] For MakeMyTrip the appeal of these products is that they need no new customer acquisition, only a switch placed in front of someone who is already paying.^[1]

In January 2024 the company agreed to buy Happay, an expense management platform, from CRED, which turned the financial business toward corporate customers as well as individual travellers.^[1] A company that already manages an employee's flight and hotel booking can also manage the expense claim that follows the trip, and that is the logic behind the acquisition.^[1]

Hotels, homestays and alternative accommodation

Hotels are where the company makes its money, and supply is the battleground on which the online travel business is fought. The company listed about 60,000 Indian properties by 2020, alongside roughly 500,000 outside the country, and since then it has added homestays, villas, guest houses and independent hotels that were never part of a chain.^[1] The wider the supply, the less likely a traveller searches elsewhere.^[7]

In 2025 the company mapped more than 2,000 hotels and homestays near over 100 national parks, a deliberate push into wildlife and nature travel at a time when Indian travellers were looking for short domestic breaks.^[1] It is a small slice of the inventory but a useful one, because a tiger reserve stay is a package rather than a room, and packages carry a better margin than a single night.^[1]

Hotel owners, however, have a complicated relationship with the platform. Many depend on it for demand and resent the commission and the pressure on rates, which is the argument underneath the price parity dispute at the Competition Commission of India.^[1] Every large online travel company in the world faces the same tension, and it tends to intensify as the platform's share of a market grows.^[1]

Corporate travel and the business segment

The acquisition of Quest2Travel in 2019 took the company into corporate travel management, a segment that behaves very differently from consumer bookings.^[6] Corporate clients sign contracts, negotiate rates, set travel policy for their employees and expect reporting on what was spent and where, so the relationship is stickier and less seasonal than a consumer one.^[6]

The unit is also the reason the group can sell flights, hotels, cars and expense software to the same buyer, which is what the Happay deal added.^[1] A business that books travel for its staff is a customer for the whole stack, from the ticket to the foreign exchange to the final expense claim.^[1]

Business travel also feeds the consumer platform, because employees who book through their company account are already familiar with the product when they book a personal trip.^[1] The segment is smaller than the consumer business in revenue, but it brings volume that is less sensitive to a weak festive season.^[1]

Reading the numbers

For anyone following the company, four numbers matter more than revenue. The first is hotel room nights, because hotels carry the margin and their growth shows whether the push into supply is working. The second is the take rate, the share of every rupee of bookings the company keeps, which moves with the mix of hotels, packages and advertising.^[1]

The third is the air ticketing volume, which brings in the travellers the hotel business later sells to, and the fourth is the share of bookings that come from the app, because a booking made in the app is cheaper to win and easier to sell again.^[9] Set against those, the residual Trip.com Group stake of about 16.9 per cent and the slow return of international travel are the two external factors that most often move the share price.^[9]

Related entries