MakeMyTrip’s Insight into Online Travel Planning Behavior

Industry and Competitive Context

India's online travel market stands as one of the most structurally significant digital commerce sectors in Asia. According to publicly available market intelligence aggregated by research platforms, the market was estimated at approximately $23 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of approximately 8 to 10 percent through the end of the decade. This trajectory is being driven by three mutually reinforcing forces: a rapidly expanding base of smartphone users, a steep decline in mobile data costs following the Jio-led disruption of 2016, and a post-pandemic surge in leisure travel aspirations among Indian consumers across income segments.

Within this market, the competitive landscape is structured around an oligopoly of digital intermediaries. MakeMyTrip Limited (NASDAQ: MMYT), operating its flagship MakeMyTrip platform alongside Goibibo and redBus, holds the dominant position. Market intelligence published by travel consultancy firm Videc estimated MakeMyTrip's overall OTA market share at approximately 53 to 57 percent as of 2024 and 2025, a figure corroborated independently by multiple analyst reports including Goldman Sachs, which cited a 50-plus percent share in its January 2026 earnings review. Below MakeMyTrip, a tightly clustered group of domestic competitors — Ixigo, EaseMyTrip, Cleartrip, and Yatra — each hold market shares in the range of 7 to 9 percent. International OTAs including Booking.com, Expedia, and Agoda compete primarily in the hotel and accommodation segment, while India's government-owned IRCTC retains commanding dominance in online rail ticketing, a segment in which OTAs participate only as resellers.

The competitive architecture creates a structurally unusual situation for MakeMyTrip: it simultaneously holds a market-leading position and faces escalating margin pressure, because price transparency in flight ticketing leaves limited room for differentiation on product alone. This forces the strategic conversation upward — from transactional superiority to experiential ownership of the travel planning journey itself.

Brand Situation Prior to the Strategic Shift

MakeMyTrip was founded in 2000 by Deep Kalra and made its NASDAQ debut in August 2010, becoming one of India's first technology companies to list on an American exchange. For much of its early growth phase, the company operated as a transaction-facilitating intermediary — a platform where users arrived with a predetermined travel intent, compared prices, and completed bookings. This model was commercially functional but strategically limited, because it positioned MakeMyTrip as a destination reached at the end of a consumer's planning journey rather than a participant in that journey's earlier, formative stages.

The structural challenge intensified as the company's own segment data made clear the financial cost of over-dependence on air ticketing. According to MakeMyTrip's FY2025 earnings release (published May 14, 2025), the Adjusted Margin percentage for air ticketing held flat at 6.4 percent as a proportion of gross bookings, while hotels and packages delivered an Adjusted Margin percentage of 17.8 percent — nearly three times higher. In raw terms, air ticketing contributed $373.1 million in Adjusted Margin for FY2025, while hotels and packages contributed $429.5 million, overtaking air as the largest margin contributor for the full fiscal year. This segment inversion carried a direct strategic implication: future profitability depended on migrating consumer behavior upstream, toward discovery and planning, where higher-margin hotels and packaged travel could be introduced as natural outcomes of an assisted journey rather than as supplementary add-ons after a flight booking.

This was not merely a product design problem. It was a consumer behavior problem, and one that required MakeMyTrip to fundamentally rethink who it was serving, at what stage of the travel decision, and through what kind of interface.

Strategic Objective

The strategic objectives articulated through MakeMyTrip's public communications across earnings calls, investor presentations, and official press releases point to three interrelated goals. First, the company sought to shift from being a booking utility to becoming what Group CEO Rajesh Magow described in a Skift interview as a "travel superapp" — a single, integrated platform capable of serving consumers across the full travel lifecycle from initial inspiration through post-trip support. Second, MakeMyTrip sought to deepen its penetration into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, which represent a structurally underpenetrated segment of India's travel economy. Third, the company aimed to use AI and machine learning not merely to improve operational efficiency but to reshape the consumer's planning behavior itself — converting passive browsing into assisted discovery and translating conversational intent into confirmed bookings.

These three objectives are strategically unified by a single underlying consumer insight: the majority of India's prospective travelers do not begin their travel planning on a booking platform. They begin it in conversation — with friends, on social media, through aspirational content — and then move laboriously through a fragmented search process before arriving at a transaction point. MakeMyTrip's strategic bet was that capturing the inspiration and discovery phase, rather than simply waiting at the transaction finish line, was the path to both market expansion and margin improvement.

Campaign Architecture and Execution

MakeMyTrip's response to this strategic challenge was built around a phased investment in AI-driven travel assistance, culminating in the August 2025 launch of what the company formally described as a "GenAI-enabled Trip Planning Assistant" built on an upgrade of its existing AI interface, Myra. According to the official press release issued by MakeMyTrip on August 7, 2025 and hosted on the company's investor relations portal, the GenAI Trip Planning Assistant was designed to assist users across every stage of travel planning, from destination discovery and itinerary generation to in-trip support and post-sales resolution.

The architecture of the assistant represented a genuinely novel design choice in the Indian OTA context. Traditional booking platforms rely on filter-based navigation — users specify origin, destination, date, and budget, and the system presents ranked results. This interface presupposes a consumer who already knows what they want. MakeMyTrip's GenAI assistant, by contrast, presupposes a consumer who is still forming their travel intent, and positions the platform as the entity that helps crystallize that intent into a bookable decision. Group CTO Sanjay Mohan, quoted in the official press release, described the system as a multi-agent AI framework that collaborates across categories — flights, hotels, and ground transport — to deliver a seamless experience in real time.

The assistant was designed to accept inputs via voice and text, a deliberate choice that reflected MakeMyTrip's consumer behavior data. The company's Q2 FY2026 earnings call, as reported by Medianama in November 2025, included commentary from CEO Rajesh Magow noting that voice adoption in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities was 50 percent higher than in metro areas. This observation shaped the product's interface prioritization: voice-first navigation was not a convenience feature but a market access feature, designed to serve the millions of Indian travelers who are more comfortable speaking than typing on a small smartphone screen.

In February 2026, MakeMyTrip announced a formal collaboration with OpenAI, disclosed through a Business Wire press release. The partnership integrated OpenAI's APIs into the Myra interface, enabling what the company described as a shift from passive search visibility to active participation in AI-led discovery. According to the press release, the collaboration was designed to allow MakeMyTrip to respond dynamically to conversational travel intent and translate that intent into structured, transaction-ready outcomes across flights, hotels, and ancillary services. Rajesh Magow was quoted as saying the collaboration ensured that "when travellers start their journey through conversation, MakeMyTrip becomes a seamless extension of that discovery process."

Positioning and Consumer Insight

The foundational consumer insight that anchors MakeMyTrip's strategic evolution is observable across multiple public data points: a meaningful portion of travel planning happens well before the transaction. According to management commentary cited in MakeMyTrip's Q3 FY2026 earnings highlights reported by MarketBeat in January 2026, approximately 15 to 24 percent of interactions with the Myra assistant occur during early-stage trip planning, before any booking decision has been made. This documented behavioral pattern confirms that a segment of the OTA's users are arriving not to buy but to think — and that the platform which most effectively assists that thinking phase gains a disproportionate right to fulfill the resulting transaction.

A second consumer insight embedded in MakeMyTrip's strategy concerns the language of Indian digital commerce. India's digital travel market is not monolingual. The country's mobile-first internet population communicates in dozens of languages, and a platform that serves only English-language users structurally excludes a vast portion of its potential addressable market. The GenAI Trip Planning Assistant was launched in beta in English and Hindi, with explicit plans to expand to additional Indian languages as articulated in the August 2025 official press release. The Myra assistant's multilingual, voice-capable interface was therefore not a product enhancement — it was a market boundary removal.

A third insight concerns the behavioral economics of travel planning in a high-aspiration, moderate-income population. Indian consumers aspiring to leisure travel face a complex trade-off: they want help visualizing and planning a trip but are not yet sure they will book one. A platform that asks for commitment — a specific date, a specific airline — at the point of first contact is asking for a decision that many consumers are not ready to make. MakeMyTrip's conversational interface lowers the psychological cost of beginning the planning process, allowing users to explore itinerary possibilities, ask questions about visa requirements, and compare destinations without triggering a booking commitment. The company's Q4 FY2025 earnings call transcript, available through MarketBeat, included co-founder Rajesh Magow's observation that repeat rates in a given quarter exceeded 70 percent, and that newer users were being drawn from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, "signifying our brand's penetration into deeper India."

Media and Channel Strategy

No verified public information is available on MakeMyTrip's precise media mix, platform-specific advertising budget allocation, or detailed channel attribution strategy for this period. What can be documented is the platform architecture through which the company is executing its consumer behavior strategy. The primary channel is MakeMyTrip's own mobile application, which serves as the core environment for the Myra interface. According to the company's about-us page and official press releases, travelers can research, plan, and book through both the website and mobile platforms, with the mobile app serving as the higher-engagement surface for the AI-powered assistant.

The October 2025 integration with Google Cloud for Myra, and the February 2026 OpenAI collaboration, were both announced via official press releases and received coverage in financial media. The OpenAI announcement was reported to have driven a 7.75 percent increase in MakeMyTrip's stock price on the day of disclosure, as noted by Whalesbook, reflecting investor recognition of the strategic significance of AI-led differentiation in the OTA market.

Business and Brand Outcomes

The documented financial outcomes of MakeMyTrip's strategy are publicly available through SEC filings and earnings releases. For FY2025, ending March 31, 2025, MakeMyTrip reported record gross bookings of $9.8 billion, representing 25.9 percent year-on-year growth in constant currency terms from $7.95 billion in FY2024. IFRS revenue grew 27.4 percent in constant currency to $978.3 million, and Adjusted Operating Profit rose to $167.3 million from $124.2 million in FY2024 — an improvement of $43.1 million.

The segment-level data is equally instructive. Hotels and Packages revenue grew 21.8 percent in constant currency to $520.4 million, and hotels and packages room nights grew 18.9 percent year-on-year to 37 million room nights for FY2025. Bus Ticketing, a segment that benefits from MakeMyTrip's non-metro user acquisition, delivered 31.1 percent constant currency revenue growth and processed over 106 million bus tickets in FY2025, up 22.7 percent year-on-year. These metrics indicate that the company's strategy of expanding beyond metro consumers and into multi-modal travel is generating measurable volume.

At the product level, the Myra AI assistant has documented engagement metrics across multiple public sources. According to the Q3 FY2026 earnings highlights reported by MarketBeat, Myra scaled to more than 50,000 conversations daily, with approximately 72 percent of those interactions categorized by management as "good conversations." The company's Q2 earnings commentary, as reported by Medianama in November 2025, noted that Myra was handling approximately 3 million conversations per quarter at that stage, with over 35 percent of travelers engaging with Myra up to 90 days before their trip — a metric that directly evidences the platform's success in capturing early-stage planning behavior. Additionally, Medianama's report noted that over 45 percent of Myra's queries were originating from Tier 2 cities and smaller towns, consistent with MakeMyTrip's stated geographic expansion objective.

MakeMyTrip's corporate travel division, operating through its Quest2Travel, MyBiz, and Happay platforms, crossed $1 billion in gross bookings for calendar year 2025, as publicly reported through financial coverage in Whalesbook in February 2026. The company's cash position as of March 31, 2025, stood at $763.3 million, providing sustained runway for continued technology investment without the constraint of capital-raising pressure.

Strategic Implications

MakeMyTrip's strategic evolution from a booking aggregator to an AI-powered travel planning companion carries implications that extend well beyond the OTA category. The core strategic insight is that consumer behavior in high-consideration digital categories does not begin at the point of purchase — it begins at the point of aspiration. Platforms that wait at the transaction end of this journey compete on price and convenience, which are defensible only through scale advantages that erode over time. Platforms that participate in the inspiration and decision-formation phase create a different and more durable competitive advantage: they become the cognitive infrastructure of the consumer's planning process, which generates both brand preference and structural stickiness.

The language dimension of MakeMyTrip's strategy is also instructively replicable. India's digital economy has historically been built in English, serving the educated, urban, upper-income segment most comfortable with English-language interfaces. The deliberate design of a multilingual, voice-first AI assistant represents a recognition that the next phase of growth in Indian digital commerce requires building platforms that work for the consumer's natural mode of communication rather than requiring the consumer to adapt to the platform's language. This is a design philosophy that has broad applicability across sectors including fintech, edtech, and health.

Finally, the Hotels and Packages versus Air Ticketing margin differential documented in MakeMyTrip's own public filings illustrates a principle of fundamental importance for digital platform strategy: not all transactions are equal in value, and guiding consumers toward higher-margin decisions through superior discovery and planning tools is a form of strategic margin management that does not require price increases or cost reduction. By embedding AI assistance at the planning stage, MakeMyTrip is structurally inclining users toward packaged and hotel-led travel decisions — decisions that are both higher-margin for the company and more satisfying for the consumer because they are more fully considered. This alignment of company incentives with consumer outcomes is the hallmark of a strategically durable business model.

Discussion Questions for MBA Students

1. MakeMyTrip's documented segment data shows that Hotels and Packages delivered an Adjusted Margin percentage of 17.8 percent in FY2025 compared to 6.4 percent for Air Ticketing. How does this financial structure shape the company's approach to designing its AI-powered discovery experience? What are the ethical and commercial tensions in building a planning tool that simultaneously serves consumer exploration and guides consumers toward higher-margin outcomes?

2. The Myra AI assistant is reported to handle over 50,000 daily conversations, with 45 percent originating from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Using market development theory, evaluate MakeMyTrip's geographic expansion logic. What consumer behavior assumptions must hold true for this strategy to generate sustainable margin improvement rather than simply incremental volume?

3. MakeMyTrip's February 2026 OpenAI collaboration was announced as a strategic milestone in AI-led travel discovery. Using Porter's framework for competitive advantage, assess whether AI-powered conversational planning is a genuinely differentiating capability for MakeMyTrip or a time-limited advantage that competitors such as Ixigo, EaseMyTrip, and global OTAs will replicate within two to three years.

4. The company's CEO described MakeMyTrip's aspiration to become a "travel superapp" in a Skift interview. Evaluate this ambition using the concept of platform envelopment. What is the strategic logic of integrating flights, hotels, buses, car hire, forex, visa processing, and insurance into a single platform? What are the organizational and consumer experience risks of this integration strategy?

5. MakeMyTrip's public earnings commentary notes a repeat rate of over 70 percent in a given quarter and that newer users are increasingly coming from non-metro geographies. How should the company balance its investment in AI-powered discovery tools, which serve early-stage and exploratory users, against the need to maintain the efficiency and transactional simplicity that high-frequency repeat users value? What does this tension imply about the architecture of a consumer digital platform serving behaviorally diverse user segments?