KAHINI CHAKRABORTY – Mumbai
Looking at driving revenues and increasing profit-margins, MakeMyTrip has shifted focus to hotel-bookings as a significant line of business (LoB). Currently the company sells over 2,000 hotel room-nights everyday on its portal, and with an aim to enhance this offering and leverage external synergies, MakeMyTrip has tied up in a two-way booking partnership with SiteMinder, providing their hotel customers around the world the opportunity to sell their rooms in the rapidly growing Indian travel market.
Elaborating on the deal with SiteMinder, Amit Saberwal, senior vice president, MakeMyTrip said, “Millions of Indian travellers now have a wider choice of hotels to book on the MakeMyTrip site, including properties that partner with SiteMinder in Australia, Asia, UK, Europe and South Africa through real-time inventory-listing. With this partnership, we look forward to extending our footprint to hotels in the Asia-Pacific region.” The company has also been constantly innovating with technology to create best-value products and services. “Over the past two years we have invested in automating our hotel partners to migrate this product-category online and the results have started trickling in,” he added.
Through this partnership, MakeMyTrip can now be managed by hotels using SiteMinder’s channel management system. Real-time inventory can now be listed on MakeMyTrip and, in turn, bookings from this portal can now be delivered automatically back into the hotels’ PMS and CRSs, providing a two-way connection that will benefit hoteliers who are keen to reach wider online audiences such as India.
