With markets around the world in a bit of chaos, it’s interesting to note one India travel company reporting astonishing growth. According to news from MarketWatch, MakeMyTrip Limited is going like gangbusters – the company has posted an over 50% YoY profit increase. The India’s leading travel portal may soon lead more than just India. Now this looks like a real David versus Goliath tale.
CEO Deep Kalra - courtesy Esther Dyson
MarketWatch reports via GlobeNewswire and COMTEX, that gross bookings, ticketing, hotels, and packages for MakeMyTrip increased by nearly $90 million since last year at this time. Looking at MakeMyTrip’s growth on Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, its easy to see the site is being adopted at a mercuric rate. Alexa shows the most revealing tale, with the portal being in the top 1,000 websites of any kind in the world, and in the top 80 in all India, one of the most wired countries there is.
The graph below from Compete, illustrates MakeMyTrip’s US traffic more visually.
Compete stats for India's leading travel portal - US only
For all intents and purposes, it looks like Expedia’s engagement of the India market may have backfired, with MakeMyTrip actually engaging the OTA giant’s customer base instead. Deep Kalra (image top), Chairman and CEO of MakeMyTrip, had this to add via
“MakeMyTrip was able to maintain strong growth in the quarter despite uncertain global economic conditions. Our success and market leadership was driven by offering customers great value for innovative travel products and by continuously improving their entire experience with MakeMyTrip. Additionally, our strategic marketing investment this quarter has resulted in very robust growth in transactions and expansion of margins in our Hotels & Packages business, as we worked to further differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”
China Analyst just reported on MakeMyTrip edging out industry comers and gaining the number one spot as the fastest emerging stock on the NASDAQ. MakeMyTrip may not be the most aesthetically pleasing OTA there is. The user interface may not be as cutting edge as experts would like. But then users really want value, and India is emerging into the travel game with a huge user base, potentially more travelers than the number of people in the United States and Western Europe combined. A powerful message is being sent, we believe.
We leave the reader with a TV commercial from MakeMyTrip. It’s easy to see Deep Kalra’s team knows what works in the India market. We will have more in the coming weeks on India and other emerging travel markets.
