MakeMyTrip

“So in bookings, the Indians booking on our platform, 95%. So the main market is India only.”

“I remember even in Make My Trip, when we were setting it up, none of us knew travel. Not even one person except one co-founder who had some travel background. Starting with Deep, me, Sachin, Kayur. Kayur was the only one who had some background and our leaders…”

“And especially when you have reached a scale and size, if you get soft blocks, as we call it, which means that I will have that commitment, but I don't have to write a hundred percent upfront check because I have delivered historically.”

“Like for our total market share for domestic air segments will be about 30%. And they might be single digit, high single digit.”

“Usually there is rate parity. It's not that we have cheaper, but you know, the best deals are available on the hotel website.”

“So right now, volume wise, overwhelming, 75, 80% of the bookings will happen in the app.”

“And you know, yes, today you can go to smart buy and you have the Infinia card and on HDFC you can buy, you leveraging your points. But guess what, that also is being powered by one of us.”

“Well, Nikmatrip, let's say gross booking value, last year, fully, full last year reported, it's about eleven billion dollars.”

“No, no, but we are more efficient, more profitable.”

“We actually have, and they have a feature called that, make my trip. You can bring in your brand and you can have your own native experience. We are not getting too much traffic coming in from there.”

“So early days, because these frontier models were very, very strong. So you end up using multiple frontier models, right?... Like Gemini, the Claude, the Cursor, the GPT. But the grounding of that. Will happen with our proprietary data. That data doesn't go an…”

“You know, I'll tell you the reason why I don't think that replication is so easy. In a deep transaction business versus a, you know, generic search business. Think about Google, for example. So Google historically has always been perceived as potential competi…”

“So I'll tell you about 80, 90,000 daily conversations happening today.”

“Like today also, we have 75% of the traffic coming directly on us, and that comes in with the trust built over a period of time on the brand.”

“My product is, is below average right now, you know, world benchmark, like some of the places would be world class. But if I look at it, pan India, I, it is average.”

“Is the biggest bottleneck is that travel happens to be state subject. And there is a gap between the central vision And the execution when it comes to at the state level.”

“And if you break that into then IRCTC versus all the other OTAs, including Make My Trip Go, Ibibo, Redbus, others, Zig Ziggo, and the others, all of us put together will be 15, 20%. 80% is IRCTC.”

“So I'll tell you the, you know, all of us, what we are trying to do, you know, okay, maybe I can speak for myself, is more the customer acquisition. This is a new customer acquisition channel for us. Because the economics don't really work, right?”

“But if a youngster has to do it, then young, it'll be really hard for a youngster to build this kind of a thing without completely staying high or low touch on the back of the content, right? It's very hard, right? Because you don't have a brand.”

“Actually, 50% of that population went to Varanasi also. In the, on the same trip.”

“I think huge opportunity, but then you have to dirty your hands. Because that is brick and mortar stuff, right? That is, I mean, you of course can use technology or whatever, but it is, lot of it is brick and mortar stuff that you have to do it.”

“So I don't know how many people in India know that when you buy a ticket from make my trip Yatra or clear trip or any of these place, they are passengers agents. So you pay a convenience fee. The airline doesn't pay them. And that means that when Akasa air as …”

“It was about sixty million in revenue, real revenue. At that time there was no ARR, there was no GMB. We wish we knew GMB. Maybe the company would have been listed at a higher valuation. And about eight million dollars in actual EBITDA, right?”

“Hiring somebody from Make My Trip, Clear Trip, Yatra, they're not going to help solve the problems which we are solving or the kind of structure which we have.”

“And, ah, this, you know, almost at the same time, we backed a company called Make My Trip, which was, ah, you know, I think way ahead of competition even back then. Ah, thankfully, it has retained that, ah, lead And it was making itself widely available throug…”

“I think we've had a share of good investments like Make My Trip, Red Bus, Big Basket, Topper. We've had very good investments in outsourcing. We haven't done as well in some physical businesses where there's lot more friction.”

“I don't think a company in e-commerce could have scaled as well. If it was in 2007 in India, it would have. There were early signs, you know, the yatras in the, and the make my trips were the early signs of transaction level booking, but the e-commerce came in…”

“So we exited all our stake in make my trip some time back. We had some secondary exit in Paytm. We had some in Swiggy.”