After disrupting and acquiring a significant part of the travel management industry, online travel aggregators are now seeing immense opportunity in the corporate travel market. And the reason for this is that the business travel market in India is worth $30 billion and is expected to triple in the next decade.
Yatra, for example, recently acquired Air Travel Bureau for $22.5-27.5 million to expand its corporate travel vertical. There are also startups such as Hyderabad-based FastCollab that have been started with a complete focus on corporate travel needs with a self-booking tool.
The latest entrant into the corporate travel market is MakeMyTrip. But unlike other travel management companies, MakeMyTrip has a completely different focus – it is only catering to small businesses and startups.
Ranjeet Oak, Chief Business Officer, MakeMyTrip says that 70% of travel for business purpose is done by small companies. However, many business travel providers target large corporates and these services are often unaffordable for startups and small companies.
“We decided that we wanted to solve this problem for the large part of the user base. We built an easy to use self-booking tool, which still has all the advantages of a travel management company,” Ranjeet says.
Last month, MMT launched MyBusiness, a corporate travel solution for SMEs and startups which has all features such as travel policy management, approval matrix management, a centralized payment option.
Leveraging technology, MMT’s MyBusiness, an entirely online platform lets employers put in a travel policy on the account, which reflects for employees while they make bookings. This could include the limits of how much an employee can spend on a hotel or flight booking. MMT accordingly only displays hotels within that budgetary allocation.
Ranjeet says that the approval matrix is also simplified for startups, sometimes as simple instant approvals in a click of a button.
One major advantage, according to Ranjeet is the company wallet. An Employer can pre feed the amount allocated to their travel budget to let employees book directly. “When the employee uses the wallet, it removes the need for creating tedious expense reports,” he adds.
Another major advantage to startups is GST credit. MMT’s MyBusiness lets startups update GST details on the website and the tool automatically lets them claim GST credit and even curates hotels based on which ones offer GST invoices.
Being an online tool, Ranjeet says that this gives startups and small business from tier 2 and 3 towns an opportunity to manage corporate travel bookings easily.
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