At WiT Singapore last month, two of India’s most iconic travel founders, Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip and Aloke Bajpai of Ixigo, reflected on their journeys, rivalries and hopes for the next 20 years of travel. Their dialogue captured not just how far India has come but how much further it can go.
If Bollywood were to make a movie about India’s online travel story, what would it be called?
At WiT Singapore, the audience chose: “Two IPOs and a Billion Travelers.”
Fitting, really, because when Kalra and Bajpai share a stage, you’re watching the original blockbuster and its spiritual sequel. One ignited the movement that took travel online in India; the other turned that spark into a second wave of innovation: scrappy, product-driven and built for Bharat.
Twenty years after MakeMyTrip first appeared on the WiT stage in 2005, Kalra and Bajpai returned to the event to discuss the next 20 years of global travel.
The sequel begins: India’s time to drive
When Kalra first told investors that MakeMyTrip could be “the Ctrip of India,” the comparison was both strategic and symbolic—a way to signal India’s potential to mirror China’s growth.
But as he told the WiT audience, “If China drove the last 20, India will drive the next 20, and it’ll do it differently.”
It will be different because India’s building blocks are already digital.
“UPI has done a phenomenal job enabling micropayments,” said Kalra. “People without bank accounts can transact freely. Smartphones and apps are pervasive. The payment rails are ready, the youth are online and the skies are open.”
If China drove the last 20, India will drive the next 20, and it’ll do it differently.
Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip
But there’s still one missing piece: hotels.
“India has one branded hotel room for every 10,000 people,” Kalra noted. “China has one for 300. That’s the gap.”
For Bajpai, who’s been decoding India’s complexity for 17 years, the opportunity and the challenge lies in its diversity.
“India isn’t one market,” he said. “It’s a thousand micro-markets. By geography, culture, language and transport. If you think of it as one, you’ll make the biggest mistake of your life.”
While China’s online penetration jumped from 4% to 37% in two decades, India’s curve may take longer. But that’s also its advantage.
“You have to build differently here,” Bajpai said. “You’re solving problems unique to India—from trains to long-tail hotels to the small-town user. It’s hard, but it’s also why the next 20 years will be exciting.”
The home game: Domestic rules, outbound booms
For now, domestic travel is India’s backbone, growing 15% year on year, and still largely offline.
“There are 3 billion domestic trips a year,” said Bajpai. “Most are still booked offline. Hotels are under 20% online. Homestays? Five percent. The market hasn’t even happened yet.”
Outbound, meanwhile, is India’s fastest-growing segment, outpacing even domestic air.
“There’s a billion-plus aspiration to see the world,” Kalra said. “But inbound—just 12 million visitors—is where we’ve underdelivered.
“Singapore gets more inbound in a month than we do in a year,” he said. “India has the luxury hotels, the culture, the heritage but not yet the consistency or infrastructure to attract the middle-class global traveler.”
AI: The next great disruption
When Kalra appeared in WiT’s documentary, “Online Travel in Asia: The Untold Story,” he said online travel shifted power from agents to consumers. Two decades later, both he and Aloke agree: The next shift will be powered by AI.
“AI is the internet moment to the power of the smartphone moment to the power of the app moment,” Kalra said. “It’s that big.”
He calls it both “an opportunity and a threat” for intermediaries.
Two guys in a dorm room can now build faster than most big companies.
Aloke Bajpai, Ixigo
“It’s going to be fantastic for customers—more choice, less pain—but intermediaries who don’t adapt fast will be at risk.”
Bajpai, ever the engineer, added urgency: “I think we’re underestimating how fast it’ll happen. What we think will take five years will happen in six months. Two guys in a dorm room can now build faster than most big companies.”
Both are betting on AI-powered agents—Kalra with Myra, a Hindi-speaking travel chatbot, and Bajpai with Tara, Ixigo’s voice-enabled assistant that launched in 2017.
Deep recently made his first booking entirely in Hindi through Myra. “It’s amazing and scary,” he said. “That one leap could bring 200 million more Indians online.”
Buy, build, or both?
Both entrepreneurs agree that acquisitions are essential to scaling travel in India, not just to buy growth but to buy entrepreneurial energy.
“It’s not about picking up brands,” Kalra said. “It’s about acquiring teams that still have fire. When we bought BookMyForex, I learned more in six meetings than in six months.”
Bajpai echoed the view. “No company in travel has scaled without acquisitions,” he said. “Each vertical, flights, hotels, buses, experiences, is an ocean of complexity. Our acquisitions like ConfirmTicket and AbhiBus still have their founders running the show. That’s the only way.”
The soul of travel: Meaning over material
For all the talk of markets and models, both leaders returned to something deeper: the meaning of travel itself.
When reminded of what he said in the WiT documentary—that once material needs are met, travelers will chase meaning, Kalra nodded. “That’s happening now. People are traveling not to escape but to reconnect, through yoga, Ayurveda, meditation, to detox and re-energize, to be with themselves.”
Bajpai cited India’s “mind-boggling” pilgrimage numbers. “Varanasi gets 100 million visitors a year. The Mahakumbh saw over 600 million footfalls. The scale is staggering and the opportunity to serve those travelers with better infrastructure and digital access is still untapped.”
A billion stories, one journey
“Two IPOs and a Billion Travelers” is also fitting cinematic title because both Kalra and Bajpai are still writing India’s travel script: one that fuses ambition with authenticity, technology with humanity.
In his final rapid-fire, Kalra predicted that within 20 years, travelers might no longer visit endangered species like polar bears, a reminder that the planet’s fragility runs parallel to travel’s growth.
Bajpai's pick for the next trillion-dollar opportunity? “Spiritual and wellness tourism,” he said. “Because the internet once helped us escape the world, now we travel to escape our screens.”
This story originally appeared in WiT.