"Indians are ready to book hotels online": MakeMyTrip's Manish Kalra

Recently, Yatra.com launched an ad campaign to promote its hotel and online booking vertical. The campaign reminded us of a very potent statement made by Manish Kalra, erstwhile marketing head of MakeMyTrip - the statement is in the headline. The interview was first published on afaqs.com on April 11, 2013. What's fascinating is how his words continue to ring true even today... perhaps more than they did a year back.

MakeMyTrip has recently changed its tagline from Memories Unlimited to Hotels Unlimited. afaqs! decided to quiz the travel portal's Marketing Head, Manish Kalra, on the reason why. Kalra, who has worked with Citibank, PepsiCo and Dell, has been a part of MakeMyTrip for almost three years. Excerpts:

Edited Excerpts

There are two parts to it. The first was to make the brand synonymous with hotels and hotel bookings. Secondly, Indians have limited themselves to the online travel purchase of air, train and bus tickets. Hotels, an important part of one's travel plans, are not being bought online. We saw that as an opportunity. We are combining our renewed business focus on hotels with the opportunity to tap a user who is already an online travel buyer.

We have the largest range of hotels in the country: 10,500 hotels listed in India and 80,000 across the world. In India, our nearest competition would have some 5,000-6,000 hotels listed. We know that the consumer is on the verge of shifting his hotel booking behaviour to online and wanted to be present right there when that happens. That was the idea behind the change in branding.

It's true that people come to us for airlines but we don't see any cannibalisation taking place. Transportation is the core of our business and our focus on hotels just redefines the additional offerings we are providing. Our research tells us that 55 per cent of hotel bookings in India happen at the time of check-in.

Hotels and holidays currently would account for almost 20-30 per cent of our overall revenue, with the rest being divided between air tickets and tours. The hotel segment is growing at high double digit rates versus the airline part which is not growing so much. That is why a lot of investment in terms of marketing and manpower is being pumped in to grow the hotel business.

Catering to consumer needs across platforms and channels kept me very busy last year. We follow the consumer in his day to day activity across mediums. So if our TG is spending considerable time online and on TV, we will be present on both the platforms. If the consumer is searching about information on the mobile, we should be there in the form of an app or a WAP site. If a consumer is trying to research his holiday on the internet, I as a brand should be there writing blogs for him. If the consumer is on YouTube, I should have some videos there. So, we plan our media mix keeping consumer behaviour in mind.

We have scaled ourselves to saturation point as far as online marketing goes. Traditional mediums like TV are very effective in expanding the overall online travel market. This will help us penetrate Tier II and III cities and get the people there to transact online. In the coming years, a lot of our media mix will shift towards TV with a bit of radio.

Vernacular is a very important part of penetrating into real India. However, India has a distinct advantage of having English as a second language. We are still two years away from that kind of penetration happening in India. However, we plan to come up with vernacular content on our website within a year. Tactically, right now, we do a lot of geo-targeted ads which are vernacular. So if a person is surfing in Tamil, he will see an MMT ad in Tamil.

Mobile is a big opportunity and a lot of people are experiencing the internet for the first time through the mobile. To tap such consumers, we have a mobile enabled site and apps for every platform. We also do specific advertising for people who access social media on mobile.

However, the biggest challenge for a business like us is the payment gateway. Getting people to transact on the mobile is very difficult as we don't have a uniform payment system for this device. So, if 100 people come on the website daily on the web around 8 will transact; whereas if they come via mobile only two will transact.

It depends on the marketing objective. Whenever we do TV advertising, we experience a surge in our online traffic. Then I have to do the math of how much of this incremental traffic can be converted into business. This is the era of integrated marketing and each of your channel is having a rub off effect on the other.

Right now, as my ROI (Return On Investment) is diminishing on digital, I am putting more dollars on TV. Besides, TV helps the brand do two things that online doesn't allow. It allows us to tell a story and also build an emotional connect with the consumer.

(Smiles) I think it is a mix of both. Our objective was to tap the next set of people who are going to come online and we realised that cricket gives us that opportunity big time. Besides, it also helps us in creating the brand recall among people who might not know us.

We will be extending this tie-up on TV where we have players from the team like Cameron White, Ishant Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan who will promote our brand. We saw it as a good marriage between cricket and getting the right connect for the brand.