Travel from foreign countries is the only major laggard now: MakeMyTrip CEO

livemint.com:

Mint in an exclusive interview that celebration travel has been growing consistently. This trend is likely to continue in the near future, with the March quarter and subsequent ones expected to see strong demand owing to several holidays and long weekends, he said. In the December quarter the company reported an increase in profit to $24.2 million from just $0.2 million in the same quarter of 2022.

Here are some excerpts from the interview. I don’t think we need to take an aggregate view on airfares. For a market like Rajasthan, which is a wedding destination, we continue to see very high rates.

Maybe Goa as well. But some other destinations may not be seeing such high rates. If we have more supply coming in, we will see prices will come under pressure.

With fares — domestic or international — we forget to factor in the three or four years of inflation during the pandemic when there was little or no increase. It's just during the last year that rates have increased. So if we were to pick up the annualised CAGR of inflation, the higher fares would make sense.

The base is now set or settling at these fares and is not likely to be disturbed unless there is a slowdown. Inbound is the only major laggard, and not just on our platform. However, until now, we were not necessarily focusing too much on inbound travel.

The main reason was that every big domestic market or region in India was doing well. Similarly, if we look at Europe, one of the biggest regions for travel into India, that itself has been only growing as a domestic market, with people travelling far less from overseas. That has caused a lag effect.