More Indians are now booking tickets and hotels online than ever before. Nothing can beat the comfort of being able to plan a trip from the comfort of your home. You can check out the prices and compare them to get the best out of the deal. A company that holds a major share in the Indian online travel industry is MakeMyTrip. Since 2000, MakeMyTrip is helping millions of Indians book railway tickets, airlines tickets, bus tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and buy holiday packages. If you want to know more about India's top travel company, read on to learn all about MakeMyTrip's success story.
MakeMyTrip - Company Highlights
Startup Name | MakeMyTrip |
---|---|
Headquarters | Gurugram |
Founder | Deep Kalra |
Sector | Travel-tech |
Founded | 2000 |
Parent Organization | MakeMyTrip (India) Pvt. Ltd. |
Website | makemytrip.com |
About MakeMyTrip
MakeMyTrip - Vision and Mission
MakeMyTrip - Product and Services
Founders of MakeMyTrip and Team
MakeMyTrip - Subsidiaries and Acquisitions
MakeMyTrip - History/How it was Started
MakeMyTrip - Funding and Investors
MakeMyTrip - Business Model And Revenue Model
MakeMyTrip - Awards
MakeMyTrip - Name, Tagline, and Logo
MakeMyTrip - Acquisitions and Mergers
MakeMyTrip - Startup Challenges
MakeMyTrip - Competitors
MakeMyTrip - Growth/Revenue
MakeMyTrip - Founder’s Advice
MakeMyTrip - FAQs

About MakeMyTrip
India’s leading online travel company MakeMyTrip was founded in the year 2000 by Deep Kalra. Headquartered in Gurugram (Haryana), the company provides online travel services that include flight tickets, domestic and international holiday packages, hotel reservations, rail and bus tickets.
MakeMyTrip - Vision and Mission
MakeMyTrip's mission is to provide customers a one-stop shop for all their travel needs. It aims to give the best possible user experience across the entire travel journey; this includes effective planning resources, superior booking experience across all channels, and in-journey 24x7 live customer support.

MakeMyTrip - Product and Services
MakeMyTrip Limited is an Indian online travel company founded in 2000. It’s services include air ticketing, hotel and alternative accommodations bookings, holiday planning and packaging, rail ticketing, inter-city bus ticketing, car hire, and ancillary travel requirements such as facilitating access to third-party travel insurance and visa processing.
The company’s culture of continuous innovation and “customer first” strategic focus in India’s travel market has allowed it to become the industry leader and positions it to accelerate the online presence of predominately offline hotels and accommodations.
MakeMyTrip has a pretty large team of data scientists. It uses chatbots extensively—Gia for Goibibo and Myra for MakeMyTrip. These chatbots help solve a majority of the post-sales queries and will soon start dabbling in sales. MakeMyTrip also forayed into the corporate travel segment through MyBiz.

Founders of MakeMyTrip and Team
Deep Kalra is the founder of MakeMyTrip Limited, the holding company of India's leading travel brands: MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus.

MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra was born in Hyderabad and studied in Delhi and Ahmedabad. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Economics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi in 1990 and his MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad in 1992. Kalra joined ABN AMRO straight out of IIM Ahmedabad where he worked for three years before taking a year long break. He worked with AMF Bowling to set up bowling alleys in India before joining GE Capital in 1999 as VP of Business Development.
As the CEO of MakeMyTrip, Deep Kalra guided the company from its inception till its listing on NASDAQ in August 2010. From August 2013 till February 2020, Kalra functioned as the Group CEO. In February 2020, Deep Kalra stepped down from the post of Group CEO to resume responsibilities as executive chairman of the MakeMyTrip board, while co-founder and current CEO Rajesh Magow took charge as the Group CEO.
“We believe that separating the roles of Group CEO and Executive Chairman will allow us to focus more on long-term strategic opportunities within and outside India, while maintaining our market-leading position in our existing businesses,” MakeMyTrip owner Deep Kalra commented on his step-down.
Kalra also serves as the vice chairman of Internet and Mobile Association of India. He is one of the founders of Ashoka University and is a part of its governing body. He is also a founding member of "I am Gurgaon", an NGO.
MakeMyTrip co-founder and CEO Rajesh Magow is an alumnus of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. Magow served as the Regional Head - ACE North at Aptech Ltd and was the CFO/Head of Financial Services at Ebookers prior to joining MakeMyTrip in 2006.

MakeMyTrip - Subsidiaries and Acquisitions
MakeMyTrip Subsidiaries are Ibibo, Easy to Book Holding B.V., ITC Group, Luxury Tours & Travel Pte Limited, Quest2travel.com India Pvt. Ltd., Hotel Travel Ltd., Travis Internet Private Limited, MakeMyTrip (India) Private Limited, and Makemytrip.com Inc.
The company has acquired 5 organizations. Its latest acquisition was that of Quest2Travel on May 1, 2019. The organizations acquired by MakeMyTrip are as follows:
Acquired | Date | Price |
---|---|---|
HotelTravel.com | November 2012 | $25 Million |
Easytobook.com | February 2014 | $5 Million |
MyGola | April 2015 | - |
Ibibo Group | October 2016 | $720 Million |
Quest2Travel | May 2019 | - |
MakeMyTrip - History/How it was Started
The idea for starting MakeMyTrip came to Deep Kalra when he was wondering about the endless possibilities of the internet while trying to sell his wife's car online. While booking a holiday to Thailand, he realized that the internet could offer more competitive prices by cutting out the middleman. Prompted by this thought, Deep founded MakeMyTrip.
MakeMyTrip - Funding and Investors
MakeMyTrip raised its first Series A funding of $10 million in 2005. It then raised another funding of $13 million in 2006. And then $15 million in Series C funding in 2007. In 2016, MakeMyTrip launched its IPO. It received $180 million. Later, it launched another IPO and raised $330 million. The second IPO happened in 2017 and the company has not seen any funding activity since then.
To sum up, MakeMyTrip has raised $548 Million in funding over 5 rounds.
Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
---|---|---|---|
May, 2005 | Series A | $10 Million | Tiger Fund, Helion Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures & SAIF Partners |
December, 2006 | Series B | $13 Million | Helion Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, SAIF Partners |
October, 2007 | Series C | $15 Million | Tiger Fund, Helion Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, SAIF Partners |
Januray, 2016 | Post-IPO Equity | $180 Million | Ctrip |
March, 2017 | Post-IPO Equity | $330 Million | Ctrip, Prosus & Naspers |

MakeMyTrip - Business Model and Revenue Model
MakeMyTrip lets users book air tickets, bus tickets, buy holiday packages, book hotel accommodations, and hire vehicles. Users can also access other travel-related services like visa processing and travel insurance that are provided by third party vendors . All of these services are available through MakeMyTrip's app, website, or through MakeMyTrip-owned and franchisee-owned stores.
Besides this B2C model, MakeMyTrip has also introduced MyBiz to offer various corporate travel-related services. MyBiz lets businesses easily manage the travel and accommodation of its employees through various features such as a single dashboard, MyBiz wallet for central payment processing, and instant refunds to myBiz Wallet on cancellations.
MakeMyTrip’s revenues are currently split almost equally between ticketing and tours & hotel bookings. Hotels and packages, a higher margin category compared to airline ticketing, is the biggest revenue contributor and accounts for 56 percent of net revenue. The company is the market leader in domestic flight ticketing with a 24% market share.
MakeMyTrip - Awards
The list of accolades received by the company is quite long. Here are some of them:
- Best Travel Innovator - Travel Distribution World Asia Awards (2012).
- Singapore Airlines - Top agents award (2010-2011) ; Top Passenger Agent (2007-08).
- Malaysia airlines - Top Agent Award (2007) ; Top agent award (2009) ; Top agent award (2010).
- Cathay Pacific - Outstanding performance in (2009) ; Outstanding Performance (2007).
- Air Canada - Outstanding Performance (2008).
- Air Mauritius - All India Top Ten Agent/Top North India Sales Award (2007-08) ; All India Top Ten Agent/Top North India Sales Award (2006-07).
- British Airways - Outstanding Revenue Contribution (2007-08).
- Lufthansa - Outstanding Performance (2006-07).
- Indian Airlines - Achieving Highest Domestic Passenger Sales (2006-07).
- Kingfisher Airlines - Outstanding Performance (2006-07).
- Jet Airways - Award of Excellence (2005-06).
- Air India - Outstanding Contribution to Passenger Sales (2005-06).
MakeMyTrip - Name, Tagline, and Logo
MakeMyTrip's tagline is "Dil toh roaming hai".


MakeMyTrip - Acquisitions and Mergers
MakeMyTrip made three acquisitions – Luxury Tours and Travel Private Limited (Singapore), Thailand's ITC Group, Hotel Travel Group and ETB Group – over the years to enter new markets in the Southeast Asian region and Europe.
In August 2011, MakeMyTrip (MMT) along with private equity firm Saif Partners acquired majority stakes in Travenues Technology Private Limited which owns Ixigo.com. In November 2011, MMT invested in 'My Guest House Accommodation', a budget lodging and hotel operator.
In September 2014, the company instituted a $15 million innovation fund to support early-stage companies in the travel space. It also acquired MyGola, a travel planning website, in April 2015. The acquisition was done through the innovation fund and as part of the acquisition, all employees of MyGola were absorbed into the MakeMyTrip team.
In June 2015, MakeMyTrip acquired 18% stake in travel planning startup Inspirock. In July 2015, it invested in travel information and hotel review portal HolidayIQ to pick up approximately 30% stake in the latter. In the same month, it also invested $5 million in BonaVita Technologies, a start-up which plans to utilize the funds to build innovative products in the travel industry.
In 2016, MakeMyTrip Ltd agreed to buy Ibibo Group’s travel business in India in an all-stock deal, creating the country’s largest online travel firm which according to a note by Morgan Stanley is worth $1.8 billion.
MakeMyTrip - Startup Challenges
Speaking about the biggest challenge faced, Kalra quoted, “The meltdown of dotcom, the exit of venture capital from India, and the 9/11 attacks. By mid-2001, MakeMyTrip were hit by this triple whammy. The next couple of years were the toughest — there were no investors in sight and the company had to shrink the team. But those tough times helped bind the team together. It’s been an incredible journey and the team are thrilled for the possibilities that lie ahead.”
MakeMyTrip - Competitors
The main competitors of MakeMyTrip are yatra, booking.com, cleartrip, expedia, travelguru, easemytrip and OYO.

MakeMyTrip - Growth/Revenue
MakeMyTrip focuses on technology and data to personalize customer experience. The NASDAQ listed company saw net revenues from the hotel business surge by almost 140% to $81.2 million in the first quarter of FY 2017-18.
For the quarter ending 30 September 2019, MakeMyTrip reported revenue worth $118 Million. In the third quarter of FY 2019-2020, its revenue increased from $118 Million in Q2 to $146.9 Million. Thus, the company's revenue increased by 15.9% YOY to 146.9 Million from $124.8 Million in Quarter 3 of FY 2018-2019.
MakeMyTrip's losses has come down by 50% till Q3 of FY 2019-2020 as compared to Q3 of FY 2018-2019.
“We can turn profitable, but that will hit our growth. At this stage of the market, you cannot afford to go slow.”- Deep Kalra

MakeMyTrip - Founder’s Advice
“I think we are in a really good space where travel is really booming and most of it is moving online. What's exciting is how do we capture the mind set of this Indian who has moved online recently and who is keen to travel, and we want to be the brand that they trust instinctively and take care of them. And the vision I’ve always had is to get all our customers to become our brand ambassadors. And we keep moving in that direction and it's more important to have people come back to you unaided. And that is what we are excited about,” Kalra shares.
MakeMyTrip - FAQs
What is MakeMyTrip?
MakeMyTrip is an online travel company founded by Deep Kalra in 2000.
Who is MakeMyTrip founder/owner?
Indian online travel company MakeMyTrip's CEO and Founder is an Indian businessman by the name Deep Kalra.
What are the names of MakeMyTrip subsidiaries?
MakeMyTrip Subsidiaries are Ibibo, Easy to Book Holding B.V., ITC Group, Luxury Tours & Travel Pte Limited, Quest2travel.com India Pvt. Ltd., Hotel Travel Ltd., Travis Internet Private Limited, MakeMyTrip (India) Private Limited, and Makemytrip.com Inc.
Which is MakeMyTrip origin country?
MakeMyTrip Limited is an Indian online travel company founded in 2000.
What is the total funding amount raised by MakeMyTrip?
Till date (2020), MakeMyTrip raised funding worth $548 Million over 5 rounds.
How much is MakeMyTrip's valuation?
MakeMyTrip is valued at $2.6 billion (approximately).
When you plan your next holiday, do visit MakeMyTrip incase they have any offers going around. Plus you won't even have to get out of bed!