MakeMyTrip looks at bringing offline transport providers online to help consumers

Online travel portal MakeMyTrip plans to offer its customers a service that integrates multiple modes of transport moving beyond buses, trains and flights.

MakeMyTrip is building from scratch a platform that will interlink various modes of transportation, which it says is a herculean task given that majority of the transport sector in India still is offline. In order to achieve this, the company plans to partner with existing transport providers that have an online interface as well as bringing offline transport modes online.

"There are multiple modes getting you from point A to point B, and more are mushrooming by the day, such as self-drive cars and ridesharing. If we step back and look at what users are trying to do, they say they require a seat to go from A to B and at some level they are agnostic to the mode of transport," said Anshuman Bapna, Chief Product Officer at MakeMyTrip.

In developed nations such as the US and Europe, the availability of data from all modes of transportation can be aggregated by services such as Google. However, in India, MakeMyTrip will have to replicate models used by pioneers in the space such as RedBus to get providers to adopt technology.

This effort is largely being driven out of MakeMyTrip's new technical centre in Bengaluru. The centre which will house around 200 engineers by the end of this year, will be predominantly be used to build new disruptive and experimental technologies apart from driving its mobile-first focus.

"In one way, I think the complexity of solving it for India is significantly higher than solving it somewhere else. Just like Flipkart had to build that whole delivery stack and not just ride on top of it, we'll have to do the same thing here," added Bapna, who co-founded travel planning startup Mygola which was acquired by MakeMyTrip.

The audacious targets being set by MakeMyTrip stem from increased competition in the space, driven by an interest from Chinese Internet and travel giants. Chinese online travel giant Ctrip led a $180 million round in MakeMyTrip earlier this year while rival Goibibo Group raised $250 million from parent Naspers and Tencent.

Goibibo also acquired RedBus, one of the pioneering bus ticket booking platforms, in 2013. The move gave the company an edge in online bus ticketing and made it the leader in the space. While MakeMyTrip too has its own bus ticketing platform, majority of the company's revenues still come from hotel and flight ticket bookings.

By interlinking several modes of transport such as buses, trains, flights, cabs and even ridesharing, MakeMyTrip can not only open itself to a whole new breed of Indian travellers, but also multiple lucrative revenue streams.

"We're doing this because we think that the rest of India travels in a fundamentally different way that no one has even begun to capture right now," said Bapna.