BackNow restoring salaries of employees: MMT’s Rajesh Magow
As we rebuild and reboot travel business post lockdown, it is clear that deeper collaboration and partnerships between various players within the ecosystem will be key, says Magow
PremiumNEW DELHI: Travel and tourism have been hit hard by covid-19. Post-pandemic, the sector would see demand for deeper and wider collaboration among stakeholders in the value chain in order to make a sustained recovery. In an interview, Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group CEO, MakeMyTrip Ltd (MMT), said the company has been witnessing early signs of recovery for holiday products including weekend getaways, staycations and daycations.
Edited excerpts:
What cost-cutting, downsizing measures have you undertaken in recent months?
With revenue falling off the cliff and likely to ramp up gradually, travel businesses have had little choice but to manage resources tightly to ensure that they battle this storm well and come out stronger.
We have been looking to manage our costs to balance out short-term need and long-term sustainability of the business. We took several cost rationalisation and restructuring measures to re-engineer our cost structure to make it more variable or semi-variable. This included cutting back on our variable costs as well as fixed costs including pay cuts and some unavoidable right sizing. The good news, however, is that with the business coming back, we are now in process of restoring employees' salaries.
How do you plan to push the envelope further?
As we rebuild and reboot travel business post lockdown, it is clear that deeper collaboration and partnerships between various players within the ecosystem will be key. We have just launched myPartner platform that has been conceptualized and designed to empower travel agents,with rich content and inventory built over the years by MMT. Through this tech platform, MSME travel businesses can fuel their growth by embracing digitization as they get real-time access to the widest inventory of hotels available in India.
What are the emerging travel trends you are seeing? Will it largely be essential travel?
While the first wave – that lasted for nearly two months between June and July— was primarily driven by essential travel, from July onwards, we have noticed a significant increase in search and booking enquiries for self-drive holidays or short-term trips to closer to home destinations or within 300 km from the home city.
And this trend was influenced by a strong sentiment for travelling as people longed to venture out and escape from the monotony of spending months indoors. On the MMT and Goibibo platform, we are already seeing early signs of recovery for our holiday products including weekend getaways, staycations and daycations. Besides short-haul leisure trips that are making a comeback, we are also noticing growing interest in Workation trips, that offer the comfort of logging in from a home in the hills or a seaside resort, away from the city.
How long will it take for overseas travel to pick up?
Air Bubble concept is a very interesting idea to kickstart international travel with bilateral understanding of safe travel protocols among the travel bubble countries. It’s an encouraging development to see a few countries like US, UK, Germany, Canada, UAE, Maldives opening up under this program for certain visa holders. While full recovery within the international leisure travel segment is truly dependent on when a vaccine becomes available to everyone, there is growing inclination and willingness amongst travellers as search data on our platform indicates.
For September onwards, bookings have been gradually picking up for Maldives, Bali, Dubai and Malaysia. In fact, some travellers have started enquiring and searching for tourist spots in Europe and Turkey for the next summer – a trend that can be attributed to travellers’ anticipation of normal life by then and willingness to lock in their plans by leveraging deals that provide full flexibility around cancellation.
Given the overall economic slowwdown, how severely will travel and hospitality be hit?
The travel and tourism, physical entertainment, shopping and restaurants are clearly among the worst-hit industries where speed of recovery will be slower. However, once the vaccine is available, demand acceleration could be a welcome surprise for all of us!
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