MakeMyTrip: cleared for takeoff

As with any investment, your capital is at risk.

“I tried to arrange a follow-up call with CEO and founder, Deep Kalra, but rather poetically he was on holiday.”

So begins one of Baillie Gifford’s earliest pieces of research on Indian online travel agency MakeMyTrip, written back in 2013. While Mr Kalra was enjoying his holiday (hopefully booked via his company), Baillie Gifford’s Emerging Markets Team was initiating its first investment in the company.

While MakeMyTrip has been on our radar for the past 13 years, the Long Term Global Growth (LTGG) team only took an initial holding in February 2026. Even by our standards, that’s a long wait on the sidelines. Why? Liquidity considerations loomed large for most of the company’s existence. Regardless of company fundamentals, MakeMyTrip only surpassed our typical minimum market capitalisation1 of $4bn in 2024.

By 2025, with liquidity no longer a concern, MakeMyTrip’s fundamentals could return to centre stage. Our LTGG research and stock discussion in October last year provided grounds for enthusiasm. Outlier returns felt plausible, albeit a low probability. We’ll return to probabilities later in this piece, but first let’s unpack (sorry!) the fundamentals… 

As India’s premier online travel agency (OTA), MakeMyTrip sits at the confluence of at least three deep multi-decade changes: 

Firstly, India’s middle class is expected to nearly double over the next few years, reaching well over half a billion by 2030. That’s a lot of people with sufficient income to travel. As far as secular shifts go, MakeMyTrip looks like a long-term royalty on India’s growing middle class, whose rising incomes provide a possible multi-decade growth opportunity.

Secondly, a growing cohort of that middle class (currently about 380 million people) consists of Gen Z consumers, who tend to be digitally savvy. To put that number into perspective, the Gen Z cohort alone is larger than the entire US population. As such, Gen Z could help to drive online penetration rates in India from around 40 per cent today to 50 per cent by 2030, and still remain a far cry from today’s penetration rates in China, Europe and the US. 

Thirdly, pilgrimage and spiritual travel are the single largest driver (60 per cent) of India’s domestic tourism, which is growing in double-digits each year. 

Against this backdrop, MakeMyTrip has an enviable leadership position across all its main businesses (flights, hotels and ground transportation). For illustration, MakeMyTrip’s share of app downloads is more than double that of the nearest competitor, its share of monthly active users is more than five times greater, and its mindshare is approximately ten times greater. 

While domestic competition today is relatively benign, this belies the fact that competition was ferocious in the late 2010s. Back then, competitors such as EaseMyTrip and ClearTrip engaged in irrational price wars in a bid for market share, before the financial pressures of pandemic-era travel restrictions led them to refrain from deep discounting. Others, such as the budget hotel aggregator Oyo, suffered from a mix of internal and external factors. 

The fact MakeMyTrip emerged from this competitive bloodbath stronger than ever demonstrates just how difficult it can be to dislodge dominant OTAs. We learned this the hard way from LTGG’s previous investment in Trip.com, the Chinese OTA. 

First purchased for the portfolio in 2011 and sold in 2020, primarily due to increasing competition from another LTGG holding: Meituan. Yet since our sale, Trip.com’s market share in China remains dominant and its operating margin has risen to an all-time high. Our Trip.com experience is informative not just in recalibrating our understanding of the competitive dynamics in online travel, but also because Trip.com is MakeMyTrip’s largest investor and helped it to pull clear of its peers.

Foreign OTAs have similarly struggled against MakeMyTrip in India. Booking.com tried but appears to have largely retreated from the market, unable to match MakeMyTrip’s focus and commitment to the Indian consumer. In fact, MakeMyTrip has proven it can also grow beyond the domestic market, with its outbound travel business now accounting for more than a quarter of total sales and growing rapaciously.

The blue-sky scenario that we developed during our research last year therefore went something like this: robust growth in the Indian travel market spurred by the expanding middle class, rising online penetration, and increasing take-rates, could see revenues grow by four to five times by 2030. 

Meanwhile, the operating margin could double thanks to the shifting revenue mix and greater operating leverage. To top it all off, the management team is stable, disciplined and adaptable, with the co-founder Rajesh Magow (whom we met back in 2013) now CEO and surrounded by a similarly long-tenured and long-term-minded senior team.

This scenario would have seen MakeMyTrip’s market capitalisation quintuple to circa $45bn by 2030. Alluring, but the valuation multiple2 required to get there would have been at a major premium to global peers. So back to probabilities: all things considered, we didn’t reach sufficient conviction in the likelihood of this scenario coming to pass. 

Then everything changed. Following our October 2025 stock discussion, the share price plunged by roughly 40 per cent. One of the leading reasons appears to be the prevailing narrative that OTAs will be disrupted by AI. Imagine, for example, a world whereby customers go straight to a general-purpose AI assistant (eg ChatGPT) to provide travel details and make their bookings, entirely bypassing MakeMyTrip.

But our research suggests MakeMyTrip has numerous overlooked lines of defence. For example, it has deeply integrated its highly fragmented supplier ecosystem, many of which are tech-light hotels, creating a considerable proprietary moat.

Similarly, MakeMyTrip’s emphasis on reliability and customer satisfaction goes beyond simply offering competitive prices, to also provide zero cancellation fees assurance, fare lock tools, seat availability prediction, fast and generous customer refunds, and so forth. In other words, MakeMyTrip offers a full package of services that cannot be easily replicated.

Moreover, management isn’t just playing defence; they have reinvested to develop their own AI agent, which assists customers throughout the entire travel planning journey, from discovery to booking and beyond. Recognising India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world with 22 officially-recognised languages, the AI assistant also provides multilingual support via both text and voice. And it keeps improving by drawing on the company’s extensive proprietary dataset of live user conversations, hotel knowledge, user reviews, image analysis, user booking habits, and more. Again, all very difficult to replicate, especially when MakeMyTrip is now a moving target.

Back to our investment thesis. With a market capitalisation now closer to $5bn (versus over $9bn when we discussed the company last year), and no material degradation in fundamentals (if anything, they look more encouraging in this environment), suddenly a chasm between our view versus the market’s view looms large. We no longer need to make overly heroic assumptions for a 5x case from here. The probability of dramatic upside has risen more than enough to merit a place in the portfolio. 

So, tray tables up, armrests down, seatbelts fastened. Let’s go.

Glossary

1 Market capitalisation - the total value of a company’s shares on the stock market, calculated as the share price multiplied by the number of shares.

2 Valuation multiple - the price investors are willing to pay relative to a financial measure such as earnings or revenues, for example, a ‘price-to-earnings’  multiple.  

Risk factors and important information

The views expressed should not be considered as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. They reflect opinion and should not be taken as statements of fact nor should any reliance be placed on them when making investment decisions.

This communication was produced and approved in February 2026 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking.

Potential for Profit and Loss

All investment strategies have the potential for profit and loss, your or your clients’ capital may be at risk. Past performance is not a guide to future returns.

This communication contains information on investments which does not constitute independent research. Accordingly, it is not subject to the protections afforded to independent research, but is classified as advertising under Art 68 of the Financial Services Act (‘FinSA’) and Baillie Gifford and its staff may have dealt in the investments concerned.

All information is sourced from Baillie Gifford & Co and is current unless otherwise stated.

The images used in this communication are for illustrative purposes only.

Important Information

Baillie Gifford & Co and Baillie Gifford & Co Limited are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Baillie Gifford & Co Limited is an Authorised Corporate Director of OEICs.

Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited provides investment management and advisory services to non-UK Professional/Institutional clients only. Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited is wholly owned by Baillie Gifford & Co. Baillie Gifford & Co and Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited are authorised and regulated by the FCA in the UK.

Persons resident or domiciled outside the UK should consult with their professional advisers as to whether they require any governmental or other consents in order to enable them to invest, and with their tax advisers for advice relevant to their own particular circumstances.

Financial Intermediaries

This communication is suitable for use of financial intermediaries. Financial intermediaries are solely responsible for any further distribution and Baillie Gifford takes no responsibility for the reliance on this document by any other person who did not receive this document directly from Baillie Gifford.

10061436