MMT completed 25 years, starting the company in 2000, diversifying into all verticals of travel and tourism, as an online booking engine. The last four years have been phenomenal, returning with best ever profits, year after year. We spoke with Deep Kalra, founder and chairman and Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and Group CEO at MakeMyTrip, on this happy occasion, traversing with them the course of their journey, the milestones achieved, and what awaits them going forward? One of the rare interviews the two have given jointly.
With a market cap of USD 11.5 billion (as on 16th May, 2025), MMT must be the most precious travel company in the country. Trailing just behind the mighty IHCL, with a market cap on the same day of USD of 12.7 billion, this is an incredible journey, with four successive years of producing the best ever annual results, year on year. (see box)
Travel in Times when War Clouds Loom:
Navin: I walked through the hall before coming in here, And I felt a sense of pride walking into that hall with those few hundreds of kids sitting there with computers and high tech. It must be a matter of great pride and satisfaction for the two of you to look back 25 years and see this very, very beautiful narrative ‘Made in India’ story.
Deep: Thank you, sir.
Navin: So, Rajesh, MMT as an online travel channel is more like a repository of whatever is happening in the travel and tourism industry, more than an individual hotel website or more than an individual travel agency site because you represent all of them. So, you are the common platform. So, my first question would be is that we just witnessed this huge trauma of a war. Big, huge cancellations.
So how did these get noted on your MMMT platform?
Rajesh: The first question that you asked, because immediately my mind went back to the covid times, and what happens is, like you said, we are a neutral platform and we have multiple services that we provide, from flights to transport to rail, to bus bookings, to hotel bookings, to homestays booking and so on. And when this kind of a crisis happens in the travel and tourism industry, we are inundated. We are inundated with all kinds of calls, all kinds of customer interaction that comes back to us.
Of course, a lot of people will be worried, anxiety levels will be very high, stress levels will be very high. And they would want to re-plan their trip or cancel it, look for refunds and all kinds of things, right, as you can possibly imagine because it is the normal. When it happened in COVID, the intensity and the scale was sudden and high. And this time around when it happened, when the terrorist attack happened in Kashmir, it wasn’t any different. Overnight we had like two third of our daily bookings to that region disappeared all of a sudden.
And the reason why I said, that was a very interesting question that you asked, because this kind of work that a platform like MakeMyTrip ends up doing, isn’t talked about a lot. It is grossly underestimated, the kind of volumes that we end up handling. In fact, interestingly, even from partners, we end up taking the load off their experience centers. Because a lot of the people are coming to us and booking and we’re solving their concerns. And then I think this is the time when everybody starts to value us even more. We do lot of business with the partners, obviously they would value but during difficult times they value even more.
So, we basically end up sort of doing almost like a war room for a lack of better word. Let’s say this was this time around there was a war room in the holidays’ unit, our packages unit, because our people were there, about 700 people, who had booked through us, who were in Kashmir during that time. So how do you make sure that you are reaching out to everyone to check whether everybody is safe and making sure that you address their concerns, etc. So, lot of the customer experience related activity that peaks at that point in time.
But in terms of business, it gets hit the most as well. So, there is an advantage of a one-stop shop that we have. And there are sometimes disadvantages also, right? Because when the crisis happens, we are getting bombarded from everywhere. So every possible booking that might have happened on our platform would get impacted.
So, let’s say from that sector it was reduced to one third booking to one third of the daily volume, if you will, for flight bookings that was happening to the J&K sector. So roughly that was absorbed on the booking side. That was the Pahalgam incident.
So, I think net-net we would have had an impact of maybe about 25% of the bookings. I’m talking about generally all bookings. Air, hotel, homestays. So, leisure bookings were getting impacted more because the sentiment had dropped. But the corporate or the business travel bookings were normal. In fact, as latest as last Monday or Tuesday, we had the record business travel bookings on our corporate platform. And then it started dropping because Wednesday onwards, the action started. Monday, Tuesday was peak. On the other hand, our bus bookings, because suddenly because of this development, people were going back home. So, bus bookings were actually not impacted; bus bookings were at a high.
Navin: And were these figures different for different regions of the country?
Rajesh: Very different. The north side got impacted the most. The impact on southern states were minimal. There were quite a few people for whom we managed to change their plan. Reschedule and change. Our chat lines were about 300% overrun. And then we had to pull people, we had to stretch.
Navin: So, you do put that extra people last minute?
Rajesh: Absolutely, because you have to take care of the customers. And of course, the escalations go up. Because if let’s say, if there’s a capacity of 100%, I might have a buffer of 20%, but I can’t have a buffer of 300%; it is an overwhelming situation, you can’t manage it. But then you stretch, you pull people and get them to do overtime, you put all hands-on deck, effectively. Whatever you can possibly do. In fact, today morning, (Monday, 12th May) the good news was the nature of the calls became different – not what we got over the weekend which were distress calls, cancellations, changes, schedule changes – but positive calls, with people wanting to come back.
25 years On, the Journey with its Ups and Down
Navin: So, coming back to 25 years, you were referring that day in your presentation, from 2000 to 2025, how many ups and downs, what are the significant milestones that you can capture?
Deep: I always say the best part is not that we have completed 25 years. The best part is that the last 3 years have successively been our best years.
So, our last year has been our best year ever. The year before that was the best year ever till that year. So post COVID, we have really, really, come back much stronger because we took that crisis, which would mark as one of the worst crises for us as a time to restructure. So that would be a very big high. Obviously, the IPO in 2010, that too on NASDAQ was a big high. And then we had a massive M&A where we acquired Goibibo and Redbus. That was big because doing the M&A is easy, but to make it a success is very hard.
Quest2Travel is a managed corporate travel website, just built over 10 years by a Bombay based entrepreneur, we bought that out, that is now become our backbone for our managed corporate. My Biz we do ourselves, which is self service, almost 50,000 corporates now do self-service and get the advantage of better fares, free cancellation. Savaari is a company for Intercity travel, I would say is definitely a success. It’s also part of Book My Forex, so the Forex card that all of us use, or hopefully everyone uses, is a MMT company.
I think there have been enough successes, but some haven’t worked, which is part of the learning.
Regarding the downsides, they in hindsight have taught us a lot. Just after we started, within a year, we had a triple whammy. So, the dot com bust happened. So, our early-stage venture capitalists, eVentures, they wanted their money back, they had to pull out. So, literally the next four years were trial by fire and completely bootstrapped, back to the wall, with very little money, barely enough money to pay two months of payroll and rental.
But things were tough. They pulled out, then 9-11 happened, at a time when our entire business was NRI based, largely between US and India. The SARS epidemic happened, not to mention the covid impact. So, every time, there were challenges, sometimes the question was, can we even survive? And obviously one is glad, one did, and one just kept going and saying, slowly, let’s rebuild the business.
Building Scale, the Last Three Years and Before
Navin: So, you said your last three years have been successfully the best ever, year after year? Can you just take us a little bit between the last three years, where you are now.
Deep: Later this week we report our full year results, so everyone will see, because we end in March 31st. Rajesh is the best to talk about these. These three years have been him. He has been the captain.
Rajesh: I will tell you about the last three years in a little more detail. I believe that it is not necessarily the outcome of work done during the last three years. But it is actually the hard work that we have done over the last 20 if not 25 years. The first five years. Success doesn’t come overnight. It is the foundation. It is the relentless hard work, that we have been reinvesting in the right areas for the last 20 years. The first five years were survival, as Deep was mentioning. 2006 is when it started, we never looked back. And then IPO 2010 and building hotel business. Hotel business building was very, very difficult for us.
Since you asked about the last three years, let me share also, most importantly, what happened during covid. Just before covid, we were actually getting to becoming profitable. And that was coming out of the merger that Deep was mentioning. This is just before COVID. 2016 was our merger, the big acquisition. GoIbibo and Redbus. And it took 2 to 3 years to make sure that that merger works and then our next goal was to make overall organization profitable. We were growing very healthy, we were gaining market share, we were the market leader. Our flight business was profitable but our hotel business was not profitable because we were investing hugely. We were very close and getting there but then COVID hit us. That pushed us back.
Now during covid, we ended up doing two things. One of course was fire-fighting. And then we restructured the existing business, the cost restructure. We massively automated because we also had a thousand engineers at our disposal and we also had to keep them busy. We took a call that we didn’t want any of the engineers to go even during those difficult times. The other very important strategic call that we took, that we started doubling down on our investment on various platforms, which will give us additional revenue in the future. I’ll give you a few examples. We had started building our corporate practice through a corporate business, a corporate platform which was focusing on small and medium enterprises called MyBiz. We doubled down on that development.
Then we built a platform called TripMoney which was focusing on ancillary products like insurance and forex and even consumer lending. We built an advertisement platform, which was going to monetize our traffic; there is lot of high intent travel traffic coming in, we can get our partners to advertise on our platforms. We came up with various products on advertising.
And then we built a platform called MyPartner, which was a travel agents affiliate platform and then we went and launched in GCC market as well. We built a platform, new website, new app for UAE because UAE, India and UAE, there is huge amount of traffic, back and forth. So, we made these platforms, these developments happened during COVID, when nobody perhaps was investing because everybody was in conservation mode. The thought was simple. That how when we emerge, can we emerge stronger, and can we make up the gap what we would have lost in terms of just the momentum and the scale.
Now these businesses, if you see today, our corporate business is closer to a billion-dollar business already. Just the MyBiz platform and Quest2Travel put together. Our MyPartner platform, these are top line numbers, is about half a billion number already. And our AdTech platform is adding significantly to our bottom line, because advertising is a high margin product. Because I’m already acquiring traffic to provide services and lot of eyeballs and if I am able to monetize and get the advertisement money that goes straight to the bottom line.
Similarly, insurance, similarly forex that has picked up. Some of them are work in progress, some of them have scaled up significantly. Now, these investments, as we were recovering year by year, the last three years were helping get us the additional sources of revenue. The corporate business is growing at 40%, year on year. I should have mentioned homestays was another category that we started sort of investing behind. This was the alternative accommodations, the hostels, the apartments, the villas, and so on, the trend was also picking up. So, on one side, when the business recovery was happening, the domestic business recovered first, post covid, international business recovered later, post covid, because borders opened up later. And so, we were getting the momentum of the existing business, it was recovering. And then we had the additional sources of revenue that we had newly built. So, when all these things got together, and the foundation that was built over the last 20 years was solid, contributed to the three years that started being our best years.
MMT Today: a Large Multi-sectoral Tech Company in Travel
Navin: So today where does MMT, as an organization, how many subsets, how many verticals do you have, like corporate travel and the rest? And cumulatively how many people do you employ?
Deep: So, air and flight tickets are still probably the most prominent and dominant way of acquiring customers. But the hotel business is now contributing more, significantly more, both on revenue and profitability. So, it’s become a much bigger and because the market is fragmented, et cetera, and then like Rajesh alluded to, besides this holidays segment has always been big for us. So, bespoke holidays are also there and there’s a people side of the business, etc which is needed. Homestays have become very big, like Rajesh said; 10% of the hotel business and is growing faster. Because India is getting wealthier, second homes are coming up. People in covid also people said, we’d rather be away from the madding crowd.
Navin: In Homestays, who are your competitors, like Vistas, for example?
Deep: No, Vistas are partners, they’re supply partners. Airbnb would be our only real competitor.
And then our business would include the corporate – Manage Corporate and MyBiz. Forex is also there. Buses for us is huge. Redbus and we also offer buses on MakeMyTrip and Goibibo brands. So three big brands, Make My Trip, Goibibo, Red Bus and Rail. So, anything to do with travel, whether it’s retail or corporate, we will do, we will offer. And the volumes are interesting. I mean, we were doing some comparisons with other public companies. I think on the holidays business, we are probably larger than Thomas Cook. Overall, the scale is quite high.
We are the most profitable internet company in the country. And in people terms, about 3000. But if you include all the other invested companies and some subsidiaries, then around 4,500.
Navin: So, in terms of, you said the biggest online company in the country the biggest travel company, I want to understand is MMT the first choice for an Indian booking?
Deep: Our top of the mind awareness in all these categories, air tickets, hotels and all is overwhelming. It’s like 60% plus, the overall brand. So, it’s very very high brand.
Navin: But what about for travelers going overseas?
Deep: Overseas booking.com for hotels and Airbnb for homestays.
Navin: No, but why not MMT?
Deep: I’m not saying we are not there. I’m saying that is our competition.
Rajesh: If you look at numbers, I think we would still be higher. For Indians going out, even travelling out, both for our international flights and international hotels, our numbers are higher than booking.com. By far. Where they score better than us is actually mostly the inbound traffic.
Navin: For Indians, for NRIs living overseas, what is your market share when they want to book in India?
Deep: I think very high for the US based ones, very very high. Which is the largest NRI bank. Anything to do with India would be very high, but of course NRIs also use agents. See, it’s an age thing. Some people still use travel agents offline. Most people in the US NRIs have changed to online, labour is so expensive there. There are not too many people there to help you book. Then they like to come here, either be with family and then plan a side trip. So, that side trip, let’s say to Goa or whatever, and that’s becoming by the way, this occasion-based travel, is becoming very big. So, people are coming, they want to show their kids the country, they might go to Kerala, they might go to Kashmir, etc. Some will pre-plan it, some will give it to their local, let’s say sibling if there is, to just plan it. So, it’s done in many different ways. But whichever way it’s done, it’s a very small part. If you really look at the big market, is that of Indians traveling within India and going overseas, domestic and outbound travel.
Top Domestic Destinations as Choice
Navin: So for the domestic, which are the top three destinations?
Deep: So well, before this happened, Kashmir had come back really strongly. And it was in covid, at least I went there twice. But I think Goa remains a perennial favorite. Maybe people who are very well-travelled, who have the money, might say, listen, yeah, we’ll go, but what I’ll spend a little bit more, why not go to Phuket as a direct flight, why not go here and there?
In Goa, the accommodation capacity has really grown. The hoteliers were saying maybe they didn’t face the best season because homestays have grown so much. The homestay market in Goa has exploded. You go to Assagao in North Goa, you throw a stone and there’s a homestay. Goa has really exploded. The nicest beaches in the north which don’t have big hotels, Ashwim and Morjim, they have homestays. Go deep down south, you have big hotels but you also have homestays. And now, the real new Goa is being discovered away from coast. So deeper inland, the forest, the river. So, Goa I think is perennial. Winters, I think Rajasthan and Kerala are still very, very popular and they both have capacity. Rajasthan again, there’s been so much more capacity.
The Partnership between Deep and Rajesh
Navin: One question going back 25 years, looking at 25 years, I’m very keen to ask you, how did this partnership form and how has it progressed over the years? How do you juggle your roles today?
Deep: Well, knock on wood, progressed only in the right direction. We met again, 24 and a half years or 25 years ago. Rajesh was joining as CFO. And that was also meant to be. We had another VP finance who was leaving because Enron offered him double the salary. And I said, how can you leave? We’re just getting there. We’re just starting. And he said, they’re doubling my salary. But by that time, we were suggested candidates by the hiring consultants, and I met Rajesh and there was instant, I have to say instant, both ways acceptance.
We just like, it was a lovely talk, lovely chat. I told him openly. This is what we really need. And of course, it’s high risk. I think he had already taken a big plunge, if I think about it, in his career. Which was a very steady career. He’s a CA, a topper, everything. And Voltas, steady. And then he joined EdTech when EdTech was very new.
So, I think he had taken his plunge already into the more exciting thing. So, this was appealing to him, he was appealing to me and we just started like literally like that and then through all the ups and downs, he did that all. We did a big build operate transfer thing. He ran the e-bookers operation which actually kept us alive. I was trying to straddle both things, keep MakeMyTrip going because that was the original dream.
And I think this went on, till and from 22 onwards, it’s become very clear because I went non executive, but I wanted to go non executive earlier when I turned 50, but he wouldn’t have any of it. So, by that time, so Rajesh, post IPO, moved into CEO role, we got our CFO, and then moved into CEO India role and I was CEO group. But the reality was there was a fair deal of overlap we were doing, but I think we knew we managed it very well because we had our, I think, natural strengths obviously; everything finance and business came to him very naturally. I enjoyed a lot of the product tech stuff, so I think we managed it very nicely. But then I it was my personal thing that I wanted to spend more time doing other stuff.
A lot of good stuff is happening on the not for profit and all that, spending much more time doing that. And you’ll hear stuff there also, I’ll tell you soon, working on something.
But yes, I am chairman and then wherever I’m needed, like Rajesh whenever tells me to come, whether it’s some people’s stuff, senior interviews, new joinees, immersion, we always like to do that together.
Navin: For all these years, did you ever visualize where you were going or where you could go? Or it was literally like, happening on the go.
The Importance of People in this Business
Deep: I don’t know for Rajesh, he should speak. But I think I can tell you very candidly and because I feel very close to you, so in good times you need a sounding board and advice for all the big punts, other day to day things keep happening. What are the biggest punts we make, big investments in tech. I think the biggest one which we don’t talk about enough, and in our company we do, is the people you hire. And dare I say, the people you let go.
The people you hire, everything in our company is because of the people we have. So, the hiring decision becomes the most important way till date. I think we spend a lot of time on either the hiring or the simulating, definitely the motivating. And then sometimes things aren’t working out. The toughest decisions were good people, but you’re saying, listen, you’re not pulling your weight.
But in the tough times, there you really need, I think, counsel to keep going. Like you need, I think, someone who will give you the confidence that whatever you are doing is right. It’s difficult to do it alone; I don’t think this company would be a fraction of the company it is today, if it wasn’t for him (Rajesh) or KJ’s contribution, Sachin’s contribution and many of the guys you may not know, their names, contributions have been invaluable and that’s why we wanted to call them and honour them. So, before the partner event, on our actual birthday anniversary, on 1st April, we did our big town hall, all staff in Delhi, all staff in Bangalore but we also called 100 alumni in Delhi and a very large number in Bangalore of people who had worked with us, but had moved on for various reasons. And almost everyone showed up. We had a guy who took a flight from US to come. We had a guy who took a flight from Singapore to come, they came on their own.
The Ambition, the Success and Going Forward
Navin: So, coming back to my question, 20 years ago did you ever visualize where you will reach?
Deep: Not this scale, I mean that is the honest response, not this scale.
Rajesh: We were clear of where we want to go. Meaning it was clear that this is a model. We wanted to be successful.
Deep: Successful, and also create a brand people really love. And definitely solve, no, be the driving force, to make travel research and booking very easy. The rest will follow, and take care of your customers in whether good times, bad times, the rest will follow and the approach was always actually, the only reason we are there, is we are still today a tech company, that happens to be in travel. We have learned travel willy-nilly. But today also you put me with some travel veteran. I don’t think I’m still like wired.
No, because the approach is tech first. The approach is scale first. Even on the people side when we say people, we have a wonderful program called Holiday Experts, HEs. These are over 1000 women who work from home. They work from home on a fully variabilized basis. We have trained them, we give them phones, we give them computer, but most importantly, we give them leads and training. There were some of them in the workforce in travel, some not in travel. We give them leads, they service our customers. Look at the scale, it is win, win, win. The best of them makes more than a lakh a month, consistently. Minimum, most of them make, about 20,000 a month. Win for us, fully variable. If they do a sale, they make money, we make money, we don’t pay them any fixed amount beyond.
Navin: So, having arrived here now, what next? Some more segmentation?
Rajesh: See if you look at the country, if you look at the country first, and this is the kind of discussion that we have typically, internally, that we see one of the things that have, I am answering also your previous question, worked out for us was, in the past let us say 20-25 years, that we were always thinking of building long term sustainable business. So, we were not fly by night, like if we did IPO in 2010. Now IPO is never an exit for a founder or a co-founder or the team, right, because you are actually starting the journey, you are making commitments out there in the market to the investors, a larger base of investors, etc. So, we are building a long-term business, right, so we were in it for long term. So that is the sort of work we have looked at. Now, every four, five years, when we do our strategy discussion, this year also, when we were thinking about the next three years, because the technology business moves really fast, then you get to see a huge amount of headroom still in travel and tourism. But before that, the way country is positioned today, the biggest demographic dividend that we have in the country, the consumption story that we have in the country, the rising middle class, disposable income growing and habits changing. For people now they are ending up spending more on experience than products or any of the conventional ways of saving less, spending more. So, lot of that country evolution is going to help the travel and tourism industry to also grow.
Many other sectors will grow. Now if you start using that lens, then you think the next 25-50 years is going to be bright for MakeMyTrip as well, within travel only. So you can always have plans and say, I can have line of sight to whatever I am doing currently, and from that perspective, the plate is full that we have got few things that we still need to investment in, investments made recently, we need to scale them up, we need to grow our international business, we need to grow the GCC investment that we made, like in Intercity cab business that has to scale up because we just acquired Savari. Our bus business is growing, our home stay business is growing, our hotel business is still growing. Our online penetration, by the way, since you were asking about market shares earlier, the online bookings for the hotels in this country is only 20% for hotels business. For flights, only domestic flights, it’s about 60% and we still have huge amount of headroom from an online booking standpoint and if you see the internet population and the e-commerce population overall, there is still a gap. Internet population is reaching a billion, or will reach a billion very soon, 800-900 million already, but e-commerce will be 250 million today. It’s not 900 million.
So, there is a huge amount of gap. And therefore, if you use that lens, there is clearly room for growth for travel and tourism, and which we will continue to do. We took a conscious call that we don’t want to go beyond travel. We will go for geo-expansion, which we have started with GCC. And we see the UAE experiment has been good so far. We are already the leading OTA in flights there. But we want to grow the hotel business. And then, Saudi Arabia is another identified market.
Navin: What about the region – Sri Lanka, Nepal?
Rajesh: Sri Lanka and Nepal are not necessarily huge source markets. This is a huge source market. They are all destination markets. Nepal, by the way, is a very small market. Sri Lanka is not necessarily a huge source market. Destination market, yes, we are growing. And for our Red Bus business, by the way, we are in 6 countries. Wherever there is a bus market, large bus market, private bus market. Which are the other ones? So, we are in Peru and Colombia, by the way. Singapore and Malaysia are already doing well. We are in Indonesia, we are looking at Vietnam and any other. We had actually looked at Brazil also but it hasn’t really worked out.
Navin: But you are not saying you are going to use all your money surpluses now into acquiring say 200 homestays?
Deep: No, no, no. So, I think being asset light is very key to our success and we like that platform play – tech, asset light. Also, I think it takes away a lot of neutrality. The moment you invest in a supplier and we had some very nice offers before, some big chains were going public, to take a little bit of a stake. But I think that takes away neutrality. Then you compromise some decisions, you obviously want to favor, we have to be neutral, we can do special deals from time to time.
Navin: What about a website like competing with a website like Tablet for the luxury market?
Deep: A very nice thing on our app, you can toggle and ask for a MMT Black experience. So, my app will look different because I’ve asked for the experience. So, I’ll only see higher end stuff. So, we are responding to that in a different way.
Sustainability of Indian Tourism
Navin: One last question, your message for Indian tourism?
Deep: I think the same as for MMT – the best is yet to come. The real message to give from the heart is let us take care of our tourism sites. Our destinations. If we don’t take care of our destinations, whether it is overcrowding, whether it is, just the waste disposal, the plastic usage, we’ll have nowhere left to travel. Then, whoever has money will go overseas. Whoever doesn’t have money or time will be in India. I don’t think any country has what we have to offer for tourism.
Navin: But are we lagging behind in the sustainability?
Deep: Sustainability, we are at the bottom of the thing. And it comes with awareness. It comes with the upper capita. But there are other developing countries, who do a better job than us. I don’t think Thailand is that much better off in per capita, perhaps only slightly. They do such a good job of cleanliness. Or we don’t like comparing with some, but you look at large populous countries, very aware of what can be done, like I’ve seen Brazil and I’ve seen Peru. Peru’s not a well-off country, but the way they take care of the tourism sites, is most commendable.
Navin: What do you think is missing?
Deep: I think it’s an awareness, education and strict policing and zoning laws also. We are allowing people to build mini hotels where houses were supposed to be. Ten people were to live in that small area, now you suddenly have 40 getting crammed in with a hotel. Zoning has to be tougher. Governance must come first.
