MakeMyTrip is a platform of scale and that is reflected in our numbers: Raj Rishi Singh

Pitch BrandTalk 2023 saw an insightful session by MakeMyTrip’s Chief Marketing and Business Officer – Corporate, Raj Rishi Singh, as he took the audience through the brand’s journey from (-) 70 million to (+) 70 million dollars (Adjusted Operating Profit).

Starting off with some statistics, Singh shared that the Group brands see 74 million monthly active users – 3 out of 10 travellers who book domestic flights, book them on MakeMyTrip; 1 lakh-plus unique hotels also booked in a year. “It is a platform of a scale, that scale is reflected in our numbers,” he added.

In FY ’20, the brand had a gross booking value of USD 6000 million. “Then our topline got wiped off because of Covid, so we entered a period where our existence got questioned because there wasn’t any travel happening,” Singh shared. However, he added that the brand has now recovered from this period quite well. “Last year, FY 23, we clocked USD 6500 million dollars in gross booking,” he said.

However, Singh continued, the interesting story here was in FY ’20 the company made an Adjusted Operating Loss of USD 70 million. “Then we went into 2 years of hibernation during Covid, but when we came out we had transformed our business and got to a similar topline and making USD 70 million in Adjusted Operating Profit,” he said.

How did the business transformation happen?

Singh shared that the brand optimised the customer acquisition cost and built a CLM engine through which it built loyal and repeat customers. “We also automated post-sale, a lot of our cost is on servicing when you have booked the tickets, so those flows had to be automated and today you can cancel your hotel, change your date online,” he said. The brand also saved costs by optimising its tech stack, using machine learning and data science to do revenue management.

MakeMyTrip was majorly a B2C platform pre-Covid. “From that, we transformed into a multichannel play. 1/3^rd of travel happening in India is people travelling for work. We addressed that with a business travel platform. Similarly, a unique channel is the Holiday Expert channel, which is basically 1500 women who work remotely across India who operate from their home and sell holiday packages to consumers, thus providing a flexible earning model for them as well,” Singh shared.

He believes that the brand has transformed itself from a B2C hotels/flight app to a holistic travel app. Singh shared an example from the journey.

“Four years back we had zero play in corporate and we saw it was a big opportunity. But Covid happened. We used those years to build a revolutionised product for corporates to use,” he mentioned. The brand used all the goodness of its B2C platform and built a product called myBiz for corporates to use.

The second pillar of MakeMyTrip’s growth story was how could it provide innovative offerings which are deeply rooted in consumer behaviour and how can it leverage data science to build these products.

Singh continued, “During Covid, people were very hesitant about travel. They didn’t know that if they booked a journey and later didn’t want to, could they cancel it or change the date. There was a need to build assurance and give assurance to the consumers. So on top of a flight ticket, we used data science to bring about products that have zero cancellation or products, which have date change as a top-up.”

Similarly, with hotels the brand figured out that a lot of Indians were travelling internationally for the first time. They don’t know where to stay. “So we provided enabled maps where you can see places of interest and then look at properties closer to those places and that’s how first-time travellers are getting assisted, and they feel confident about travelling to new locations,” Singh mentioned.

He also highlighted how staycations have become a very sought-after concept today. “Pre-Covid, staycation meant one long vacation in a year. Now what has happened is, this one long vacation has been split up into multiple small weekend vacations. Typically, on an e-commerce platform, the way you search is that you search either the destination or a property. But when you are searching for a staycation, you are not searching for a destination, you are searching for places to go nearby. So we enabled search to support this too,” he added.

Speaking about the recently ended ICC World Cup, Singh shared MakeMyTrip’s Homestays campaign. “Cricket is an expensive property, but we took a unique twist. Instead of going the regular way, we took the fan way out, considering that the fans need to travel and book hotels. “You might have read that there was news saying hotels costing over a lakh. So we put a unique twist to it saying stay at homestays! That is how we started building the homestay category.”

The brand has powered search very differently, Singh shared as he explained with an example. “When you search a hotel in Mumbai, it would mean different things for different people. For instance, if you’re a business traveller you may need to stay near an airport. Depending upon past behaviours or the profile of a consumer, we power search differently,” he said.

He also shared that MakeMyTrip is India’s largest review platform for travel. “We use deep LLM models to concise reviews and give pointers to travellers basis their need.”

The brand’s third pillar was how they should stay relevant to consumers. There are two ways of brand building nowadays, says Singh. “The first is by buying traffic originating on Google. The second is wanting people to engage with the app directly,” noted Singh while concluding the session.