AGBS – Ahmedabad AHD/2019/49CC Authors: Himani Kapadia

Case Study Title: MakeMyTrip: Redefining Business with Big Data Analytics
Domain: Knowledge, Information and Communication

Abstract:

The case “MakeMyTrip: Redefining Business with Big Data Analytics” traces the evolution of
MakemyTrip Private Limited (MMT) that was considered to be the legend in the Online Travel Agency
business in India. The case begins with the journey of Deep Karla, MMTs chief founder. Then describes
the evolution of MMT from the time when Internet penetration was too low and travelers hesitated to
do online bookings and other transactions. Later, the case documents how Big Data Analytics bridge the
gap between travellers and OTAs. The case also mentions how MMT adopted BDA to enhance traveler’s
experience and improve its service offering. At last the case concludes with the look into the
opportunities as well as the limitations faced by OTAs with the use of BDA.

Issues for Discussion:

 Enhancement of Customer Experience with the help of Big Data.

 To understand how big data analytics helps MMT harness their data and use it to identify new
opportunity.
 To understand the opportunities and challenges for online travel companies like MMT to
efficiently use Big Data Analytics.

Case Study

Background:

Years ago, when the world wide web did not exist, travelers used to book their holidays through brick
and mortar travel agencies who provided a handful options of hotels within the preferred budget and
tourist would faithfully pay the agents against the reservations made. When the first online travel
agency was introduced in 1994, travelers spurned the idea of wiping a credit card on an alien site, raising
trust as well as transparency issues. Fast forward two decades to this, and the entire scenario of online
Travel Agencies (OTAs) had changed, offering consumers with one-click assistance on all their travel
needs.1

One of such OTAs named as MakeMyTrip (MMT) was the pioneer and most favorite among holiday-
goers. Headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, MMT was an India based online travel company, founded
in the year 2000. The company offered various online travel services which included flight tickets,
domestic and international holiday packages, Rail and bus tickets, hotel reservations and guided tour
assistance. The company had its presence in the form of 14 companies–owned travel stores across 14
cities and 30 franchisee owned stores across 28 cities and kiosks on the major airports of India. 2

1
Sanjai P.R. “How Big Data helps customize your travel",
https://www.livemint.com/Industry/nOuoxUKwOgwrIad998JofJ/How-Big-Data-helps-customize-your-travel.html, Jun 30 th
2014
2
“about us”, https://www.makemytrip.com/about-us/company_profile.php
AGBS – Ahmedabad AHD/2019/49CC Authors: Himani Kapadia

MMT and BIG DATA ANALYTICS (BDA)

MMT offered vivid range of products and services with around 100,000 properties at domestic level, two
million rooms with ever increasing numbers and bookings for around 350 airlines and 50000 flights
worldwide. With such a glut of choices, it was difficult for travellers to identify relevant products and
choose from them. To solve such problems MMT adopted Big Data Analytics (BDA) to solve critical
business problems in the area of customer segmentation, personalization, building data pipelines, etc.
Piyush Kumar the Head of Data platform engineering at MMT was the architect behind the real time
streaming, batch processing and user feedback and reviews. MMT used two models of BDA to fulfill its
urge to develop technology and products and meet the needs of the ever- evolving travel ecosystem. 3

Customer segmentation where BD stocks, mobile personalization offers, discounts and other strategies
for product building and data driven decisions are considered. Here, the team also uses Clickstream,
Mobile, Transactional data, CRM (Customer relationship Management) and user feedback or reviews
data to offer relevant products to customers.

Personalization and Recommendation plan uses the tool persuasions which persuades users to book the
right product at the right time and the right place in the right content to ensure a delightful holiday plan
structure that falls above the expectations of the consumers. The persuasion come from meaningful
insights which are nothing but the results of the computation of static content of the user activities like
search, previous bookings, reviews and rating at most granular levels.

Another milestone that brought exceptional success to the journey of MMT with BDA, is their project
named COSMOS which is primarily leveraging user’s data and device data to monitor users’ activities
including the location, search history, navigation, shortlisting and preferences; added with their years of
travel booking experience; topping it further with intelligent persuasion and social proofing; eventually
resulting to conversions that too matching the expectations of the customers. COSMOS ensures the ‘my’
in the MMT app is taken seriously and is designed specifically to retrace, reconsider the searches and
avoid cart abandonment. When it comes to exultant travel experience, the one size fits all approach
doesn’t work. COSMOS makes the user experience personalized, right from research and planning phase
to the comparison stage to the booking phase to the post booking travel related use cases. COSMOS
provides cross selling alternatives to its users on the basis of various filters like “star categories”, “price
barometers”, “location”, “popularity”, “amenities” etc. COSMOS ensures heavy reduction on
information overload, conducting to a win-win situation, extensive customization for the end user and
accolades and monetary benefits for the organization. 4 (Exhibit I).

Exhibit I

User Events Signals Insights Persuasions

Activity

Source:

3
Soni Mohit, “Piyush Kumar of MakeMytrip explains Big data operations”, https://www.upgrad.com/blog/how-big-data-
teams-and-platforms-work/ , Jan 17th 2018
4
MakeMyTrip Blog, “Here’s How We Built Truly Personalized App Experience @MakeMyTrip”,
https://www.makemytrip.com/blog/tamil/node/21852 , Nov 13rd, 2017
AGBS – Ahmedabad AHD/2019/49CC Authors: Himani Kapadia

With the use of BDA, MMT had been able to make an impeccable growth in its industry, making it a
pioneer among other OTAs.5

Twenty years ago, when mobiles were just born and internet on the mobile was not even a remote
thought, people used to make bookings through the travel agents. Now with the ever-advancing
technology, there are apps to fulfill the smallest of the needs of humans, OTAs had switched over to an
altogether new interfaces which were voice enabled and chat enabled, in order to keep both – front end
and the back end changed overtime. Big Data analytics had really closed the gap between the end user
and the vendors. Earlier, when people searched for options on sites, they used to get an exhaustive list
of all the possible alternatives. However, if such an exhaustive list appeared on the 3- inch mobile
screen, it became a hassle for the user. In this situation the best option was BDA. BDA enabled
communication between the traveller and MMT on the basis of the data entered, machine learning and
Artificial Intelligence.

Samyukth Sridharan, President and Chief Operating Officer of Cleartrip.com, stated “….. That’s what Big
Data can enable OTAs like us to do… Provide the capability to store data, dissect and dice it, analyze and
draw inferences from it… and finally, make real time use of it while building features and tools on our
mobile app and website.”

BDA stores every single user search and action, like the selected price range and the star category of the
hotel and also tertiary parameters like if the person used his app to log in or visited the site via Google
search. Considering the entire search history and previous booking history, BDA creates individual DNA
which is nothing but the booking pattern of the individual. Then the individual DNA is compared to the
DNA of other users- who show similar interest and booking patterns. This results into an accumulation
and comparison of the DNAs of over a thousand users. Using this data, BDA draws inferences of many
kinds, which includes an idea of when the user will buy the product (buying propensity) and how much is
he willing to shell out for the same (willing and affordability to pay). Thus BDA does the job of data
mining, data storage, data analytics, data sharing and data visualization for the OTAs.

Sanket Atal (Atal), Chief Technology Officer at MakeMyTrip.com, stated, “For a travel company such as
ours, Big Data serves as the key enabler to engage better with customers and deliver service efficiently
and intelligently. Analytics helps enhance efficiency at the business end and the experience at the
customer end by developing new approaches to customer management, revenue management and
internal operations.” He further added, “Big Data also offers us the chance to put the fun back into
travel, which at its very heart is about improving the customer experience. We want to be present at
various touch points for our customer, both pre- and post-sales.” (Footnote).

BIG DATA AND THE SUCCESS OF TRAVEL INDUSTRY:

According to Gartner- the definition of Big Data – “Big Data is high volume, velocity and variety
information assets that demand cost- effective, innovative forms of information processing for
enhanced insight and decision making”. 6

5
Watch You tube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDlV3FLhsu4&feature=youtu.be
6
Rai Abhinav, “What is Big Data- Characteristics, Types, Benefits & Examples”,
https://www.upgrad.com/blog/what-is-big-data-types-characteristics-benefits-and-examples/, Jun 6 th, 2019
AGBS – Ahmedabad AHD/2019/49CC Authors: Himani Kapadia

One of the biggest advantages of Big Data was Predictive Analysis. With the accurate outcomes that BDA
provides, it creates a win-win situation for customer as well as organizations, optimizing their
operational adequacies and reducing risks at both ends. The real frontier here is Personalization offered
by BDA. BDA enables users to search information as per their requirement and ensure fulfillment of
their aspirations. With the highly varied and competitive market in today’s era, each individual has
different needs. BDA helps tourism companies adopt a more strategic approach to their marketing
strategies targeting the right audience. This in turn creates an increased customer experience, which is
lucid, user friendly and tailor – made as per their needs; additionally, when a traveler thinks of traveling,
pricing plays a significant role. The BDA allows users to compare the deals with competitors and avail
best services at affordable prices.7

Thus, BDA helps develop customer-oriented pricing policies. On the other hand, operators in the OTAs
can also use BDA for better understanding of competitors in the sector, their business policies, the deals
they offer and their weaknesses. Thus OTAs can learn from the mistake of their competitors through
BDA. BDA can prove to be extremely valuable for budding OTAs since it is a precious Market Research
tool. It helps them identify potential gaps in the market and provide opportunities their rivals are unable
to. In the incredibly dynamic corporate world, it is herculean task for businesses to create, manage and
sustain their brand identity. BDA helps build a constructive feedback for the organization, thus assisting
in Reputation Management with the ever increasing tough competition in the market, businesses, ought
to show some uniqueness in their products and services.

Any OTA needs some out-of-the-box USPs to depict differentiation in its services, thus attracting more
and more users on its portal. The more the customer visits on the app or the site, the more the
customer volume and the better the revenue management of the organization. BDA, on the basis of the
predictive analysis, raises demands of products and services keeping in consideration the internal factors
like bargain deals of particular hotel during a certain period and external factors like national holidays
and school vacations, and then allowing the organization to adjust its supply according to the demand,
thus providing all possible alternatives to the travellers, raised price benefits to the hoteliers and
maximum profit for the organization, eventually resulting in an advantageous position to all concerned.
Lastly, the most valuable asset of the company is integrity, which eventually leads to boosted customer
confidence, higher growth rate and a sound goodwill of the business. When companies understand
customer needs, it results into strong policies for advertisement and more promotion of its products and
services. Thus, BDA helps OTAs enhance their Integrity and commercial policies. In a nutshell, travel
companies like MMT have grown manifolds in last 4-5 years owing to the implementation of BDA in
their day-to-day operations.8

CHALLENGES IN TRAVEL INDUSTRY IN CONTEXT OF BDA:

BDA, though is considered to be the cutting edge of modern market and is worshipped as a remarkable
tool in decision- making, it also has its own limitations. In fact, some industry experts and columnists
also term it as an overhyped buzzword. One of the biggest challenges to the travel industry is
inadequate data.

7
Rajput Rahul, “How Big Data Triggered Travel Industry Success?”,https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-big-data-
triggered-travel-industry-success/, January 23rd , 2019
8
The Doxee Marketing Team – Digital marketing, “Big Data in The Travel industry: Why It’s valuable and how to
make the most of it”, https://www.doxee.com/2019/06/13/big-data-in-the-travel-industry/, June 13 th , 2019
AGBS – Ahmedabad AHD/2019/49CC Authors: Himani Kapadia

One of the biggest challenges to travel industry, in reference to BDA, is inadequate data. Out of all the
available data, selecting only the appropriate one takes lot of time, energy, efforts and capital
investment and even resulting to losing opportunity at times during the backend work. Also, people use
multiple devices to search data. This, at times, leaves the company with too much database to manage.
So data overload is another major drawback of BDA. With the wide spread digitalization, demands of
OTAs have increased, eventually compelling companies to enhance their Organization arrangement,
right from effective reservation strategies, to advance employee skills to continual efforts for enriched
customer experience to improved efficiency and productivity of organizational skills to enhancing
managerial skills and also raising more and more investment. Furthermore, with such wide and varied
data, it becomes a challenge for the company to transfer data for repeated analysis to the specialist.
BDA use a very powerful yet a complete tool. The data sets collected are imprecise and subjected to
changes now and often. So deriving correlations from them is another impediment of BDA. Such a huge
volume of data leads to too much inconsistency, which becomes a major task to handle. 9

10

Although BDA earns high revenue for companies; hiring and training data scientists and Big Data experts
who can manage the data lake can cost a fortune to the organization. Another knotty issue for the
organizations is complying by the government regulations. The data collected in order to carry out the
analytics is personal as well as sensitive and should be treated with a lot of confidentiality and advocacy
meeting the industry standards as well as government rules and regulations. Additionally, this data is
highly prone to cyber security breaches. Thus, ensuring comprehensive data protection calls for another
limitation to BDA. Accessorily, factors like rapid changes in technology, the ever increasing need for
hardware needs, huge software costs, integrating various disparate data sources, etc. keeping adding
woes to the troubles of the companies. 11 12

***

9
https://www.revfine.com/big-data-travel-industry/,Jun 5th ,2019
10
CIKLUM, “limitations of big data analytics”, https://www.ciklum.com/blog/limitations-of-big-data-analytics/, January
28th ,2019
11
Harvey Cynthia, “Big Data Pros and Cons”,https://www.datamation.com/big-data/big-data-pros-and-cons.html, August 9 th
,2018
12
Yamaguchi Kohki, “7 Limitations Of Big Data In Marketing Analytics”, https://marketingland.com/7-limitations-big-data-
marketing-analytics-117998, February 12th ,2015