India's leading travel reviews site, HolidayIQ, has sold a 28% stake to MakeMyTrip for $15 million, with "mobile" very much the focus of the resulting strategic partnership.
The investment is being positioned as a Series B round for HolidayIQ.
The tie-up is focused around getting more content from Indian travellers onto both partner's web sites. Already, HolidayIQ says that 70% of the activity on its site comes from mobile. It attracts more than 11 million monthly users and has around one million reviews on its site.
MakeMyTrip's web site meanwhile averages 7.8 million unique users a month and its app has been downloaded more than 7 million times, making it the most popular in India.
And a week or so ago MakeMyTrip said that June 2015 was the first month when bookings from mobile were higher than bookings from desktop.
Hari Nair, founder and CEO of HolidayIQ said: "We look forward to working closely with MakeMyTrip in getting a much larger number of Indian travellers to participate in the creation of Indian traveller opinion’.
Meanwhile, Rajesh Magow, CEO India for MakeMyTrip.com, talked about its aim "to rapidly scale our reviews and recommendation engine as an outcome of this investment.”
MakeMyTrip also talked about HolidayIQ feeding into its "curated trip-planning content." MakeMyTrip has recently invested in Inspirock, an online planning tool which creates customized itineraries and Mygola, a mobile-only trip-planning platform.
And HolidayIQ has also been on the acquisition trail, buying specialist app developer SourceN this May.