Yatra and MakeMyTrip CEOs Embrace India's Diversity

29.03.2024 - 17:13 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal

CEOs at MakeMyTrip and Yatra Online agree: India holds more than just a country. 

“There are multiple different Indias. There isn’t any one India,” said Dhruv Shringi, CEO and co-founder of Yatra Online. “So you have to figure out which India you’re addressing.”

At the Skift India Summit 2024, Shringi and Rajesh Magow, group CEO and co-founder of MakeMyTrip, emphasized how travel businesses should account for India’s diversity of travelers and destinations. The pair dove into the importance of millennials, online penetration, sustainable business strategies, and tailored market approaches — all while considering the country’s growing middle class.

Here are some highlights from their conversation with Skift Founding/Executive Editor Dennis Schaal, shortened for clarity.

Shringi: I think there is a huge market out here on the domestic front. The number of experiences which can be curated in the domestic market are also immense. The customer finds it inherently comfortable traveling domestically, also. Having said that, I think there is still a large part of aspirational India which views international travel as a really big thing.

Magow: (For) all sorts of demographic cohorts, if you see, the income is rising across the board, whether it is less than $5,000 income, which is going to drive the, let’s say, ground transport traffic, or it is more than $10,000 income, growing from, say, about 50 million households to about 100 million households in the coming years. There’s going to be opportunity both for domestic as well as outbound international (travel).

Shringi: I think if you look at India, one thing we’ve learned the hard way is that there are multiple different Indias. There isn’t any one India. So you have to figure out which India you’re addressing.

For a moment, if you just focus on the middle class, the 25 to 30 million — because the guys who are in the top 1%, they are anyways traveling overseas — the aspirational class in India is growing pretty rapidly, and it’s no longer limited only to the metro cities. What we’ve seen is that travel is becoming, especially post-pandemic, such a top-of-mind thing for people to do, right? Everyone wants to live an experience of life.

There is a saying that’s coming in right now. It’s based on a movie in India called , meaning, “You only live once.” On the basis of that, you’re seeing people wanting to spend an incremental part of their disposable income toward travel. So, from our perspective, we are looking at going deeper into tier-two, tier-three markets (to) see how’d you access these customers.

How do you get into these tier-two market segments where people have historically maybe traveled domestically, but always had the aspiration of traveling