ONLINE TOURISM MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES AND

IMPROVEMENTS IN MAKEMYTRIP
NEHA.N AND SARAYU.K.M

ABSTRACT
This paper deals with the Tourism Management which promotes the places of interest with focus
on Accessibility, Accommodations and Attractions. The Online Travel Agency (OTA) offers
planning sources and booking capabilities. This paper addresses about MakeMyTrip which is a
part of Indian OTA. The major objective of this paper is the study of merging and acquisition
process of MakeMyTrip, their downsides in merging and the factors that help to increase their
profit through Online Travel Applications.

INTRODUCTION
Tourism Management deals with promoting places of interest with focus on Accessibility,
Accommodations and Attractions. The Tourism sector encloses the travel services like
recreational, leisure (or) business purposes within them. Tourism in India is important for the
countries GDP growth. The World Travel and Tourism Council calculated that tourism generated
9.4% of India’s GDP in 2017 and supported 8% of its total employment. The Online Travel
Agency (OTA) offers planning sources and booking capabilities. MakeMyTrip is a part of Indian
Online Travel Agency founded in 2000 by Deep Kalra. The services provided by MakeMyTrip
are flight tickets, hotels, holiday packages, cabs(New),IRCTC booking and bus tickets. The
startup services where to indulge for the overseas Indian communities to travel between US and
India. MakeMyTrip provides innovation fund of $15 million to support early stage companies in
the travel space. MakeMyTrip made major three acquisitions with luxury tours, ITC group hotels
and travel private limited (Singapore) to enter the new markets in the south East Asian region
and Europe. MakeMyTrip acquired Travel planning website like MyGola and HolidayIQ to get
their profit in holiday packages. Merging and Acquisition of MakeMyTrip with Ibibo group.
MERGING AND ACQUISITION PROCES OF MAKEMYTRIP
MakeMyTrip announced its Horizontal merging with Ibibo group on Jan 31,2017. It is
considered to be the biggest merger in the online travel industry. The advantage of having this
type of merging gives more profit and more contacts; so that MakeMyTrip could reach all the
nook and corner of Indian Tourism. Their main static is to provide Discounting to the people.
But, Discounting doesn’t guarantee customer loyalty. Once, they stop providing discounting they
would lose market share to other big players such as Expedia, Yatra, OYO Rooms, Booking.com
and Cleartrip. MakeMyTrip’s first idea was to deal with the air ticket market through online.
Further, the process of merging helped them to spread their industry vast. Their main profit was
through hotel segment. The budget hotel operates where ready to share a decent part of their
profits in return for higher occupancies coming through OTA’s. The Gross margings earns from
the hotel and travel packages segment can range between 10% and 25%.

CTRIP
NASPER
(CHINA)
(SINGAPORE)

MAKEMYTRIP IBIBO GROUP

(INDIA) (INDIA)
The above chart illustrates the merging process of MakeMyTrip-Ibibo group. This process helps
them to share their contacts of links of other countries which happend in increasing the
International Tourism. MakeMyTrip and Ibibo continue to double down on the lucrative hotels
and packages segment. The company has always said it plans to keep its primary brands-
MakeMyTrip, Ibibo and RedBus separate, claiming that all three are well-positioned to dominate
without creating any overlaps. The Ibibo group consolidated coming from 9.7 million travelled
bus tickets with gross bookings for $106.2 million. The merger will further strengthen its
leadership team and management depth in the consumer travel space in India. The deal signals
impending consolidation in the countries highly competitive consumer internet sector.

DOWNSIDES IN MERGING
The objective of merging was to reduce their discounting spends but it has only gotten worse
since then. Both the companies were under cutting each other. After merging with Ibibo
MakeMyTrip expectations were to see re-rating in the stock price for sustaining growth and to
see a profitable market share. MakeMyTrip share 28% before merging downed to 5.8% after
merging.

500

450

400

350

300

250 Pre merger( in million dollar)

200 Post merger( in million dollar)

150

100

50

0
Reveue Loss Cash balance Sales and Personal
Promotion Expense
The main downside of the merging was to face problem integrating large workforce. They had
challenge in merging two different team and culture. First MakeMyTrip took their
responsibilities in order to give back again in the different manner. This process arises many
problems within the organization. They had two people doing the same for the single role. They
had lot of retention process because of communicating within the newly merged sectors. They
ring fenced the critical people.

FACTORS THAT WOULD INCREASE MAKEMYTRIP PROFIT

MakeMyTrip goes on lot of topping fot their Online Travel Applications which brings the people
to their side with customer satisfactory. When the number of viewers increases number of usage
increases which gives a huge amount of profit. Thus, here we studied and brought up with some
of the add on factors which would bring them up with profit.
In this they have all the factors like flight bookings, cab bookings, hotel bookings etc according
to the customer needs. They could also add on with the Auto i.e., they could have a merging with
some sectors like OLA which make their profit yet vast.

They could also merge with some of the online ship ticket booking sectors which attract the
customers for tourism. This additional merging would bring profit as air booking bought.
The choice of travel purpose could be improved like Adventure travel, Medical tourism,
Ecotourism, Cultural tourism, Religious tourism, sports tourism etc so that people could select
according to their taste.
This could add on with the attractions nearby to your Trip so that everyone will be prepared with
their needs and get ready for the trip with total satisfaction.

Gaming, Mall, Shopping centre could be the add on for the hotel booking page because it would
give the additional ways to spend their timing of travel preciously. In this the list of timings and
attractions could also be added on.

The details about nearby markets could be given for the home stay and holiday packages. That
makes the customers satisfied.
It is not effective to give the details about the Restaurants because it would affect the merging
process of the small hotels. Thus we recommend going with the “special foods of that region” so
that the people would come to know about the specialty and it would also not affect the mergers.

Nearby Tourist spots would give the idea (or) plan for the ones who select their package. So that
they could select accordingly to their choice. This would come under Tourism sector and gain
their profits.

CONCLUSION
Creating biggest domain of the sector within the boundary is a challenging task. It becomes easy
by merging and acquisition process. It looks to be easy about merging the two organizations of
the categories. They face the dramatic problems which are very difficult to solve. Here we took
about the merging and acquisition process of MakeMyTrip. But these are the general problems to
be faced in every organization. When these problem have solutions and some of the additional
improvements are brought then the oraganizations gains profit with satisfaction which is the key
achievement of every organization.