On a new flight: Online travel agencies want to travel far with India's SMEs

The vast base of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India (over 40 million, by most estimates) has proved to be an attractive group of customers for many startups. Many business models have mushroomed over the last couple of years, including alternate finance providers, GST compliance providers, with a specific focus on serving small and medium businesses (SMEs).

Now, it is the turn of established businesses to look towards SMEs as these businesses look for new avenues for sustained growth. India's two biggest online travel agencies (OTAs) - MakeMyTrip and Yatra - are targeting SMEs with special attention.

Gurgaon-based MakeMyTrip has a special product for SMEs, called MyBiz. "We started building our product in the Q2 of 2017 as we realised that there was a underserved segment of corporate travel. There is very little investment that has happened in technology for corporate travel and even in that, the complete focus has been on the top of the pyramid. In India, there are 300-500 large companies which have been the focus of all the OTA players," says MakeMyTrip, chief business officer, Ranjeet Oak.


The aviation industry has seen consistent growth and according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), there will be 7.8 billion air passengers in the world by 2036 and India will displace the UK as the third biggest driver of demand among aviation industries in 2025.

"If you see the total overall market of about 30 billion dollars in India for corporate travel just the flights and the hotel business for underserved SME travel is closed to 7 billion market so the call we took that we would enter into the SME segment build out the tech-based product that will address the needs of regular SME without requiring him to have a minimum travel guarantee," MakeMyTrip, chief business officer, Ranjeet Oak.

Source - IATA

MyBiz is a special offering under the MakeMyTrip app tailored to suit the specific requirements of SMEs. And, while MakeMyTrip's competitor, Yatra has not launched an exclusive tool for SMEs, it is targeting SMEs under its 'Yatra for Business' platform.

"We have come up with a kind of DIY platform for SMEs. We have a sizable travel business when it comes to mid-and-large sized customers. We have felt that there is a huge scope in SME segment as well, considering the digitization and credit penetration that has taken place in this segment," says Yatra, COO Corporate Travel & Head of Industry Relations, Sunny Sodhi.

The long road to digitising India's SMEs had already begun with the advent of internet startups like Flipkart, and these OTAs are now showing the SMEs a better way to handle their corporate travel. "All of these companies - Flipkart, Whatsapp, Amazon, Paytm - have changed the online nature of customers in India. I do not think that through this tool we are actually converting people from offline to online. We are just converting online users to use a corporate tool and MakeMyTrip being a technology company we have provided that tool to these companies," says Oak.

MakeMyTrip's MyBiz allows an SME to simply upload their list of employees on the app, with the option of segregating employees into separate groups which provide for different travel policy settings.

Since both the OTAs have a significant share of hotel bookings in the online market, the same has been made available to their respective SME clients. "The advantage of being connected with MakeMyTrip as a corporate travel company is that we have the largest offering across hotels," says Oak.

Additionally, the company also provides a corporate wallet under its MyBiz offering which the SME client can load up and make available to its travelling employees as a way to streamline the travel expenses.

Yatra's team also helps out its SME clients in their hotel bookings, apart from travel. "We have a curated list of hotels which are basically corporate friendly hotels. We do not let our customer go somewhere else to execute something which is related to that trip because we have that capability in our house," says Sodhi. Additionally, Yatra also helps in helping its SME clients secure Visas for travelling outside the country.

Both the OTAs are working towards introducing more features for the benefit of their SME clients in the near future.