MMT to expand its footprint, gets down to business with corporate travel

After focusing on the retail segment for years, MakeMyTrip (MMT) is now ramping up its corporate travel business. From a marketplace for personal travel and curated experiences, it is looking to expand its footprint and tap into the relatively small, but steady business that corporate travel offers in the country.

“The strategic thinking for this (corporate segment expansion) started two years ago. When we were looking at overall strategy, corporate stood out as one area that we really hadn’t forayed into,” said Rajesh Magow, co-founder and CEO-India, MMT. That was the genesis of myBiz, the product for small and medium enterprises, launched last year. This April, it  acquired the Mumbai-based Quest2Travel (Q2T), which counts Tata Motors, Aditya Birla Group, HDFC Ergo and Thermax as customers. Both these products will lead the online travel agent’s push into corporate travel.

“From a product offering standpoint, we have SMEs, and large corporates. From here on, the vision is to grab a lot more market share in the corporate market. Now it’s an execution game,” said Magow. 

Learning from the past

MMT has sporadically forayed into corporate travel management in the past. It had a conventional, physical unit which would take meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) requests and fulfill them for the likes of companies like Infosys and then, Satyam Computers (now Tech Mahindra). 

The issue was that the model was neither scalable, nor had scope for leveraging technology. However, what the model lacked in terms of tech, it more than made up for, in terms of experience. It helped identify the pain points in the segment: lack of transparency, delay in payments to the travel agent and so on. 

For myBiz, MMT has built features relevant for small and medium businesses.The booking experience is seamless and very similar to its retail product.The mobile app is hosted on cloud and is built to account for the nuanced nature of travel bookings for companies. For one, the app sends out a travel request from an employee as a push notification instead of an email that can be ignored or dismissed, thereby cutting out the delays in the process. There is also a wallet option for the small business to allow for faster bookings. “We promoted the product (online), started getting inbound interest, SEO (search engine optimisation) traction and followed it up,” said Magow. It now has key account managers to manage and help select clients.

According to a report by Bain & Company (How does India travel, 2019),  budget business travellers spent $20 billion in 2018, with 86 per cent researching online and 60 per cent booking online. They base their decisions on cost, availability and consultation within their personal business network and this is the category that MMT is hoping to break into.

The Q2T bet

“Large corporates need a different interface. Everything has to reside on their premise (not in the cloud) and we decided that it is time to get into it. Our vision is we want to be a one stop travel shop, a travel super app within India and outbound,” said Magow. 
 

Q2T’s product is predominantly flights, and internal guest houses or some third party inventory listings of the corporate that it services. For more choices, MMT has already integrated its hotel inventory into Q2T. “We can also bring in international inventory (flights and hotels). Right now a lot of their (Q2T’s) business is domestic. We would help them to expand their product offerings,” added Magow. 

Given that both myBiz and Q2T serve corporate customers, there has been overlap. While the branding and businesses will continue to operate separately, in order to avoid operational level conflict, MMT has segregated business opportunities on support region base and turnover-based divisions. Up to a specific turnover, myBiz would continue to chase SMBs, while Q2T will continue its large client relationships.