Travel ticketing and hotel booking platform Easy Trip Planner — which goes by the name EaseMyTrip — expects margins to improve as “discounts ease off in the second half of the year”.
Discounting in H1FY22 – which included cash backs from airlines and hotels and subsequently passed on to consumers (end users) — stood at 4.9 per cent, as against 2 per cent in the year-ago-period.
With revenge tourism picking up and demand for domestic travel improving, the company expects a stronger H2. The catch though is that there is no third wave of infections or a mellowed down spate of infections with vaccination rates continuing to remain high.
Margins (EBITDA level) stood at 61.5 per cent in during the period under review.
According to Prashant Pitti, Co-Founder and Director, EaseMyTrip, the low base effect notwithstanding, discounting is expected to come down in the coming quarters.
“In line with the competition intensity, we have offered more discounts for customer stickiness & acquisition across our portal. We anticipate discounts to ease off for coming quarters on the back of strong recovery in demand leading to further improvement in margins, tapping down of discounts,” he told BusinessLine.
The company’s adjusted revenues(which include discounts given and claims and return back) for H1FY22 stood at Rs 150 crore, a 312 per cent jump YoY on a low base; while gross booking revenues during the period stood at Rs 1252 crore.
Nearly 93 per cent of EasyMyTrip’s GMV comes directly from consumers and nearly 88 per cent of transactions are by B2C customers (individual users).
Corporate booking and booking through travel agents still constitute smaller numbers for the aggregator.
According to Pitti, the company is gaining market share, which stood at nearly 9.7 per cent at the end of September quarter (Q2FY22).
MakeMyTrip continues to be largest player in the segment.
Acquisitions
The plan, going forward is to look at acquisitions, as it eyes a strengthening of business verticals both on the B2B and B2C segments says Pitti. Focus on bottomline expansion “will remain”.
The PAT, for H1FY22, stood a little over Rs 42 crore.
The recent acquisition of Traviate – the company’s first – is aimed at strengthening the hotel bookings vertical at the peer-to-peer or B2B level. Traviate, enables peer-to-peer transactions among hotels, online travel agencies, travel agents and others. The company has over 1.2 million hotels listed on its platform.
“So far 56,000 of the travel agents in India have used the platform. And we can leverage it to go beyond hotel bookings and into flight ticket booking, packages, cab bookings and so on. We are also hopeful of the platform turning profitable very soon,” Pitti said, adding that the focus continues to be on “bottomline expansion”.
There are apparently 70,000 registered travel agents in India.
EaseMyTrip has also expanded its international presence to Philippines, Thailand and the USA; and was also anticipating a huge pent-up “global demand for the travel and tourism sector in the coming months”, Pitti says.