The Ledger
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Rajesh Magow: Deep transaction businesses cannot be easily replicated by AI
“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…”
Magow: India's tourism product is below average against global benchmarks
“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.”
Rajesh Magow: Non-hoteliers are better equipped to build out-of-the-box hospitality concepts
“I just wanted to build on this, that it is better built by non-oteliers. So sometimes, if you have to do out-of-box thing, you don't have to get the same person from the industry.”
Magow: Supply-Side Undigitization Prevents Foreigners Booking Indian Experiences
“Because of the lack of digitization on the supply side, including all the experiences and the activities that you could potentially do, you just cannot discover anything, and you cannot just seamlessly book anything.”
Magow: IRCTC commands 80 percent of Indian online rail bookings
“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.”
Magow: MakeMyTrip uses train bookings strictly for user acquisition
“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?”
Magow: 50% of Ayodhya visitors also visited Varanasi on the same trip
“Actually, 50% of that population went to Varanasi also. In the, on the same trip.”
Magow: OYO's business pivot appears to be working based on numbers
“Pivot is working. At least on the face of it, when you look at the numbers, it is working.”
Magow: MakeMyTrip holds about 30% share of Indian domestic flights
“Like for our total market share for domestic air segments will be about 30%. And they might be single digit, high single digit.”
MakeMyTrip uses frontier LLMs grounded on proprietary user data
“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…”
Rajesh Magow: MakeMyTrip gets 75% of its user traffic directly, bypassing Google
“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.”
Magow: Indian tourism execution lags because travel is a state subject
“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.”
Magow: Launching hotel brands purely on content is very hard
“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.”
Magow: Indian wellness hospitality is a huge 10-to-20-year opportunity
“And if you start to think long term, like, 1020 years down, it's a huge opportunity.”
Magow: Indian pilgrimage travel has evolved beyond religion into cultural tourism
“Earlier pilgrimage used to be a very, Religious purpose trip that, you know, one has to go to the mindset is that I am just going to do Darshan, right? That's the only. That has changed, and the demographic has changed. That has changed to saying it's not nece…”
Magow: Modernizing Indian SME lodging is a huge, hands-on brick-and-mortar opportunity
“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.”
Magow: Founders should avoid copycat travel tech models in crowded markets
“Anyone who's thinking about travel tech, anyone who's thinking about out of box niche area, I don't think the advice should be, To start another similar me to kind of a model in a crowded space already, because that era is gone, to be honest, because the inter…”
Magow: 95% of MakeMyTrip's bookings come from Indian travelers
“So in bookings, the Indians booking on our platform, 95%. So the main market is India only.”
Magow: Keyur Joshi was the only MakeMyTrip founder with travel experience
“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…”
Rajesh Magow: Scaled travel platforms secure inventory via soft blocks without prepaying
“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.”
Magow: 75 to 80 percent of travel bookings happen in mobile apps
“So right now, volume wise, overwhelming, 75, 80% of the bookings will happen in the app.”
Magow: HDFC SmartBuy point redemptions are powered by online travel agencies
“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.”
Magow: MakeMyTrip reported $11B in gross booking value last year
“Well, Nikmatrip, let's say gross booking value, last year, fully, full last year reported, it's about eleven billion dollars.”
Rajesh Magow admits MakeMyTrip gets little traffic from its ChatGPT feature
“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.”
Magow: MakeMyTrip handles 80,000 to 90,000 daily AI conversations
“So I'll tell you about 80, 90,000 daily conversations happening today.”
Magow: India has over 900M internet users but only 250M-300M online buyers
“Internet penetration is nine hundred million plus, you know, maybe a billion already, and the online buying is about 253 hundred million, depending upon which, all, all told also by and large.”
Magow: India possesses only 1.5 to 1.67 million hotel rooms
“Like we have, whichever report that you see it, anywhere between 1.5 to 1.67 million rooms.”
Magow: Indian rail bookings have reached approximately 87 percent online penetration
“So today if you look at market share of the, ah, or starting with let's say the online penetration of rail bookings, it is the highest, 87 odd percent, right?”