International travel will be our focus: MakeMyTrip’s Suresh

How did MakeMyTrip market itself during covid-19? 

With covid, travel was very much in the eye of the storm. And for us, two years ago, it literally upended our business overnight when travel came to a screeching halt. It was very much a lesson on how to be agile. 

It became more important than ever to be really close to the consumer and their sentiment and how they were feeling. So, when the pandemic had just hit, our focus was very much around reassurance because there was a lot of fear and uncertainty. A lot of people were impacted by the sudden shutdown of travel. They had bookings, and we had to look at cancellations. There were a lot of worries. So, we had a lot of messaging around reassurance. 

As travel opened up, we launched ‘MySafety’, where we would help define safety standards for the industry.

We partnered with about 30 CEOs of leading companies in hotels (The Oberoi, Taj group) and airlines. Everyone in the industry came together and promised consumers that as the travel fraternity, we do everything we can to keep people safe. We promoted safe getaways and nearby getaways in our promotions. 

Did you focus on reviving travel? 

Yes, we had the ‘Great Indian Travel Sale’ where we tried to do our bit to get consumers to travel and make it easy for them and give them affordable options. One of our very successful campaigns was ‘MyIndia’, where we had about 20 influencers who went and travelled to offbeat locations in every single state of India. We had a lot of content that we generated for it. It was really about inspiring consumers to go off the beaten path. 

In the October-December 2021 quarter, we did the first TV campaign since covid, called ‘Jo Hoga, Wow Hoga’. But what we focused on was, again, reassurance. So, we had free cancellations as one big theme, and we had over 50,000 hotels and homestays where people could get free cancellations as well as price lock. It was a very innovative feature on flights where if they were not sure whether they wanted to travel, they could just lock in the price and book within the next week or so. 

Did you employ any new marketing strategy to engage the consumer? 

Sponsored listings are something we started maybe about a year back where we said we have all these travellers and potential travellers who come onto our platform, and they are obviously looking for travel solutions. But they’re also open to looking at solutions to other needs while travelling. We decided to open up our platform and give other partners an option to talk to these same consumers. What we’ve been building out is what we eventually hope will be one of India’s largest travel audience networks, and we have a lot of solutions that we’ve been progressively building out. We have a lot of display ad inventory that’s available on all of our platforms, where we have a lot of our partners who actually come on and advertise to them to port to come onto our platform. On the site, you have a lot of display inventory; you have some bit of video inventory and a lot of targeting options. So, you can actually target different kinds of consumer cohorts, depending on whom you’re looking to speak with. 

As international travel opens up, will you stop focusing on domestic travel experiences? 

We are looking forward to international travel opening up in a big way. Having said that, I think domestic will continue to be very, very important. People are discovering all the amazing places that are around India. As international travel opens up, however, there will be a surge. People obviously have not really been able to travel for the past couple of years. So, international travel, and giving people options around international, is something that will be very important to us.