The Man Who Convinced India to Book a Trip Online: The Remarkable Brand Story of MakeMyTrip

There is a particular type of frustration that every Indian traveller once knew intimately. Standing in a queue at a travel agent's office, flipping through a thick booklet of flight schedules, waiting for a person behind a desk to call an airline on your behalf. Travel planning in India, before the internet changed everything, was slow, opaque, and often expensive. You trusted the agent to give you the best price. You often had no way of knowing if he had.

One man decided to fix that. And in doing so, he built the company that taught an entire nation how to book its own journey.

A Banker Who Wanted Out

Deep Kalra was born in 1969 and grew up in a middle-class family. He was an Economics graduate from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and earned his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad in 1992. By conventional measures, the path ahead was clear and comfortable — a well-paying corporate career in finance.

He joined ABN AMRO Bank. He was good at it. But he was restless. Banking, he quickly discovered, was not where his spirit lived. He moved to AMF Bowling, helping set up operations in India. That venture failed. He returned to the corporate world as Vice President of Business Development at GE Capital.

And then, one ordinary evening, he tried to sell his wife's car online.

The car sold — and it sold for more than he expected. The experience was a quiet revelation. The internet, he realised, could cut through the middleman, deliver transparency, and create value for ordinary people in ways the old economy couldn't. He began spending his nights researching the possibilities. Four to five months of late-night work, his wife's savings added to his own, a handful of angel investors, and one clear conviction — that travel was the perfect category to disrupt.

In April 2000, Deep Kalra founded MakeMyTrip in Gurugram, India.

Starting in America to Win India

The founding insight was sharp and counterintuitive. In India in 2000, consumers were deeply sceptical of making payments online. Trust in digital transactions was nearly nonexistent. Launching a travel booking platform directly for Indian consumers would be fighting two battles at once — building the product and building the habit.

So MakeMyTrip launched first in the United States, serving Non-Resident Indians who needed to book flights between the US and India. This audience was already comfortable transacting online, already familiar with the concept of e-commerce, and deeply underserved — existing options for booking India travel from the US were either expensive, inconvenient, or both.

The platform quickly found traction. But the dot-com bubble burst shortly after. Funding dried up. The company that had been one of the last to get funded before the crash suddenly found itself in treacherous water.

What followed was a moment of raw determination that Kalra still recalls vividly. He did what he later learned was called a distress management buyout — buying out investors with ₹46 lakh, essentially all he had. Senior employees took pay cuts. Junior employees received no raises. Some top executives left. The rest slept in the office, having moved from a decent workspace to a mezzanine office in Okhla Phase 1.

The company survived because the people who stayed believed in what they were building.

India Comes Online — and MakeMyTrip Is Ready

In September 2005, MakeMyTrip launched its India operations. The timing was precise. Low-cost carriers had just entered the Indian aviation market, and for the first time, flying was within reach of India's middle class. The democratisation of air travel and the democratisation of travel booking arrived together.

MakeMyTrip answered the moment completely — offering online flight ticketing, then rapidly expanding into hotel bookings and holiday packages. The platform was fast, transparent, and built on the principle that had always driven the company: the traveller deserved better information, better prices, and better control.

From 2005 to 2010, the company grew 25 times. Kalra himself described it as "crazy growth." The founding team stayed intact through the hardest years, and that continuity shaped the culture of the company in ways that hiring alone never could.

India's First Internet Company on NASDAQ

On September 17, 2010, MakeMyTrip listed on NASDAQ — raising approximately US$80.5 million at a valuation of $478 million. It was the first IPO by an Indian company in the US since July 2006, and the first Indian internet company to achieve this milestone.

The listing was not just a financial event. It was a statement — proof that an Indian consumer internet company, built to serve ordinary Indian travellers, could stand shoulder to shoulder with the world's most valued technology businesses.

Rajesh Magow, co-founder, took over as Group CEO in 2020 while Deep Kalra moved to the role of Executive Chairman and later Group Chairman and Chief Mentor in 2022.

The Merger That Made a Giant

In 2016, Chinese travel company Ctrip — now Trip.com Group — invested $180 million in MakeMyTrip. The same year came the most significant strategic move in the company's history: the merger with Ibibo Group, the parent company of rival travel platform Goibibo and bus-ticketing giant redBus.

The merger was executed through a stock swap. Naspers became the largest shareholder of MakeMyTrip after the transaction. Combined, the entity became India's dominant online travel platform — serving flights, hotels, buses, trains, and holiday packages under brands that together covered virtually every segment of the Indian travel market.

In 2019, Ctrip increased its stake in MakeMyTrip to 49% by acquiring 42% of the company from Naspers through a stock swap transaction. As of June 2023, the company had 146 active franchisees and listed over 60,000 accommodation properties in India and over 5,00,000 outside the country on its platform.

MakeMyTrip's Unique Marketing Strategy

From "Memories Unlimited" to "Dil Toh Roaming Hai"

MakeMyTrip's most important brand repositioning came when the company made a crucial observation: travel in India had stopped being an annual ritual and had become a recurring aspiration. Following qualitative research over several years, the company shifted its tagline from "Memories Unlimited" to "Dil Toh Roaming Hai" — a phrase that captured the restless, always-wandering heart of the modern Indian traveller. The repositioning was accompanied by a new logo and a five-week multimedia campaign across TV, print, radio, and digital platforms, including the IPL.

The #BefikarBookKaro Campaign — Bollywood Meets Travel

In 2016, MakeMyTrip made a strategic decision to aggressively grow the online hotel booking category — a segment that remained highly fragmented and underpenetrated despite the success of flight bookings. To do this, the company brought in two of Bollywood's most energetic stars: Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt. The campaign, #BefikarBookKaro, created by Publicis Capital, dramatised a powerful insight — that Indian travellers believed they could get better deals by booking hotels directly, when in reality they were missing out on far better options on the platform. As MakeMyTrip's Chief Marketing Officer Saujanya Shrivastava explained, the duo was chosen because "they represent the new age India which is confident, bold and not afraid to try new things — all that we stand for." The campaign ran across TV, radio, outdoor, social media, and digital platforms simultaneously over eight weeks.

Digital First, Always

MakeMyTrip's marketing philosophy was ahead of its time. At a moment when most Indian companies were still treating digital as a supplement to traditional media, MakeMyTrip had already made it the core. As its CMO stated plainly: "Digital is the core. We have never used traditional marketing as an alternative to digital marketing." Television was used for specific goals — new user acquisition or brand repositioning — while digital drove the everyday engine of the brand. This orientation allowed the company to target, measure, and optimise its marketing in ways its offline competitors simply could not match.

Myra — AI at the Heart of Customer Experience

In 2025, MakeMyTrip launched an updated version of Myra, its AI-powered virtual assistant, which handles over 55,000 daily conversations in multiple Indian languages across the entire travel booking lifecycle. Rather than treating AI as a novelty, MakeMyTrip embedded it into the core customer experience — making booking, changing, and resolving travel queries faster and more accessible for a linguistically diverse country.

The Journey Continues

What Deep Kalra started with his wife's savings and a late-night conviction about the internet has become India's largest and most trusted online travel company. Every time an Indian opens their phone to check flight prices, every time a family books a hotel for a holiday they have been planning for months, every time a young couple clicks "confirm booking" for a trip they have dreamed about — MakeMyTrip is quietly, reliably there.

From a mezzanine office in Okhla where employees slept on the floor, to NASDAQ, to the pockets of hundreds of millions of Indian travellers — it is, by any measure, one of the most compelling journeys in Indian business history.

And it all began because a man sold his wife's car on the internet and couldn't stop thinking about what else was possible.