Corporate travel bookings up 46% this March over Jan 2020: Rajesh Magow, CEO, MMT

Corporate travel bookings grew 46% in March this year compared to January 2020 on MakeMyTrip and are continuing to rise further, said group CEO Rajesh Magow. "The good news is as far as domestic corporate travel is concerned, it has opened up across segments, including large corporations. It’s not just small and medium enterprises as that is how it started. Everyone seems to have started to travel. Industry conferences and corporate offsites are happening,” he said.

MakeMyTrip has 1650 mid and large clients and 30,000 SME clients, and it added 1000 new clients in the mid and large space in the last two years. Its new clients added over the past few quarters include Vedanta, Byjus, Zomato, Indian Oil, SBI, HDFC, Viacom 18 and ICICI Securities, on its myBiz platform and Quest2Travel.

The company had acquired corporate travel management company Quest2Travel in 2019. “And then all hell broke loose. But we see this category growing now. We are developing our platform and adding more features like GST compliance and expense management features for corporates and for us, we see the corporate travel segment growing by 50% quarter on quarter," he added. Magow said MakeMyTrip has acquired between 5000-10000 new clients in the SME space in the past two years.

He said the long term view on travel did not change for corporations during the pandemic and that helped the company get more clients. “If you look at the daily run rate numbers, compared to pre-pandemic, our air or flights segment, we are doing 10,500 on a daily basis. We used to do about 6000 in February 2020 or January 2020. 50% of this growth is new accounts and 50% is same accounts. For room nights, we are growing at about 72%. In terms of GMV, the growth is over 50%. In terms of GMV, I think that we are already the largest OTA in the corporate segment,” he said.

“Despite entering late, we have taken a leading position already. On myBiz, we didn’t want to restrict only to flights and hotels. We have cabs, rails, and buses. We are also trying to add travel insurance. On Quest2Travel, what is partly done is the new front end user interface. Quest2Travel was a small company and didn’t really have the capability. We are revamping the front end interface,” he said.

Magow said while the company is seeing growth in corporate travel, international travel needs to pick up more momentum for the industry.