MakeMyTrip has stepped into the corporate travel booking segment by acquiring a company Quest2Travel. This Mumbai-based firm is a brick-and-mortar enterprise in the corporate travel business and MakeMyTrip can quickly add to its customer base and expand business volumes. A report in Forbes says that this a majority stake acquisition and no deal size has been revealed yet. Quest2 Travel counts large corporate houses such as Tata Motors, Aditya Birla Group, HDFC Ergo and Thermax, among its customers. The scope involves the whole gamut of assistance to the corporates in their travel requirements.
These activities include employee’s travel request approval, online booking, invoice generation and final invoice settlement. While MMT has entered this lucrative settlement only now, rival Yatra.com has been in the corporate travel management business for some years.
MakeMyTrip has also been in the news recently for a share-swap arrangement where the stake held earlier by Naspers of South Africa were taken over by Ctrip, an online travel agency from China giving the Chinese firm, a solid 49% stake in MMT. Ctrip also acquired 4% voting rights in the Nasdaq-listed firm.
India has a robust corporate travel business that was worth over $32 billion in 2017 and is also one of the fastest growing, compared to the other countries. Some 8000 large corporates engage the services of the travel agencies to handle their travel arrangements. The industry segments which appear to use the services of travel agencies are telecom, BPO, Automotive, Finance, Energy, Pharma, Engineering and IT. These comprise ticketing, hotel room bookings and local transport facilitation for their travelling employees. Besides these large companies there are over 100,000 companies in the SME category who hire travel agencies. The volume of business is being predicted to grow to $51 billion in another 2 years.