Indian OTA MakeMyTrip has bought an 18% stake in www.inspirock.com, "an online planning tool for developing customizable itineraries."
The deal was made by MakeMyTrip's Innovation Fund, a standalone unit within the business set up last September. It has access to $15 million in total and is looking to stake up to $3m in start-ups or early-stage travel tech companies.
The Inspirock move comes a month or so after the innovation fund bought mygola.com, offering another variation on the travel planning theme. Inspirock offers access to US and European supply while Mygola concentrates on mobile as its platform.
Talking about the deal on its Q4/FY15 earnings call, management said that Inspirock and Mygola were part of MakeMyTrip's plans to target "higher customer engagement during trip planning."
Elsewhere, the Q4/FY15 numbers showed that MakeMyTrip continues to grow, although not as well as the markets would like - shares have dropped 10% since the numbers came out late last week.
MakeMyTrip's financial year runs from April to March. In the twelve months to end-March, gross bookings were $1.6 billion generating revenues less service costs - its chosen metric - of $138.9 million in FY15, both up by 32%.
Within this, air transactions volumes for the year came in at close to 5.5 million, with nearly 1.4 million hotel and packages transactions. In the previous year air volumes were just shy of 4 million with hotel and packages at around 870,000.
Net revenue margin for the year was down for air - from 6.6% to 6.1% - but up for hotels and packages - from 12.6% to 13.2%. Combining these gives the business an overall net margin of 8.1%, the same as last year.
Looking ahead, it identified "driving mobile adoption and further improving the business mix in favour of hotels and packages" as priorities for the year. It expects that its air margins will continue to drop and that revenues (less service costs naturally) will increase (on a constant currency basis) by 22%-26% this year, quite a drop from the 32% reported for 2015.
Mobile adoption rates are mentioned briefly in the earnings statement. In the Jan-March quarter "mobile users accounted for more than 40% of total online traffic and 22% of online transactions in India" with no indications about what sort of year-on-year increase this represents.