How India's EaseMyTrip Built a Brand Waiving Booking Fees

25.08.2023 - 14:19 / skift.com / Peden Doma Bhutia

Having started as a mom-and-pop travel agency, EaseMyTrip today figures among the largest online travel agencies (OTA) in India with a market capitalization of $1.1 billion while being completely bootstrapped.

And Prashant Pitti, the EaseMyTrip co-founder, said this has a lot to do with its “no convenience fee” model that has helped the company earn a high volume of return users.

The convenience charge or booking fee is a standard among all online travel agencies and airlines in India.

In its filing with the Indian market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India, in 2021, the company claimed to have overtaken Yatra.com, in gross booking volume and revenue, to become the second largest online travel agency in India.

Having started in 2008 as an offline market for travel agents EaseMyTrip, founded by the three Pitti brothers — Prashant, Rikant and Nishant, entered the consumer business three years later.

Pitti said they understood pretty soon that most of the travel business would move online. However, venture capitalists were not ready to back them up as the Indian online travel market was already populated by companies like MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra and GoIbibo.

However, the travel agency experience stood the company in good stead, according to Pitti, as he called it the secret sauce for the company’s success.

While other online travel agencies are focused on the online part of the business, ensuring that their websites look pixel perfect, EaseMyTrip pays more attention to the travel agent bit as it looks to provide a perfect after-sales customer experience, he said.

“Most online travel agencies have outsourced their call center, but we run our own call center because we believe that customer loyalties are built and destroyed at call centers,” he said, explaining that while they sell travel products online, the after-sales customer service is provided through these call centers.

This, according to Pitti, has also led to EaseMyTrip’s growing number of return users, which he currently pegged at around 93 percent.

This high repeat-user base helps the company save precious marketing dollars, allowing it to not charge a convenience or booking fee, according to Pitti.

According to Pitti, EaseMyTrip took a huge risk during Covid deciding to refund airfares to customers for cancelled flights even before the airlines had processed the refunds. 

“We had about $25 million worth of cash reserves in the bank and we managed to refund $16 million in airfares, while hoping that none of the airlines would shut down.”

This, said Pitti, helped EaseMyTrip earn goodwill in the market.

And while he acknowledged that Covid had been tough for the company, Pitti said EaseMyTrip managed to bounce back really fast,