Curiosity = Innovation + Continuous Improvement

Satish Mani - Senior Vice President - Technology Development

 

“A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.” - John Assaraf

 

After several decades of hard work, today we can easily say that for most Indians who book flight tickets online, the first name that comes to their mind is MakeMyTrip. This is a comfortable place to be in. But like someone said, ‘For cool things to happen, you have to get out of your comfort zone.’ 

In early 2017, I undertook a project to go beyond the airline-created itineraries and started creating MMT itineraries. What did this mean? Instead of giving the customer the options that the airlines provided to get to a particular destination, be it domestic or international, we wanted to give them options that could add to their travel experience. This new feature would intelligently combine multiple city stops to provide customers with cheaper and better options. 

 

Like if you’re travelling from New Delhi to Auckland in New Zealand, a quick search for a New Delhi to Auckland flight will tell you that most flights go through Singapore and have long layovers there. If Singapore has been on your travel bucket list too, they can use the time between flights to explore Singapore by travelling on a multi-city ticket. This way, you can club two holidays into one, squeezing in time to explore a new place.

 

While a vast majority of travellers still prefer vanilla bookings, we have enough data and insights that tell us that a new segment of frequent traveller is emerging and he or she wants complete control over their itinerary. Our entire objective with this project and many others is to use technology to enable every customer enhance their holiday experience with this thoughtful mix and match. The idea being, adding value at every step and continuously innovating.

 

Fast forward to 2018, we undertook the challenge of enabling our customers to create, search and book one of the most complex travel products on a small screen device. It took us two months to make the product completely live for our users.

 

“My husband stays in the US and I travel there often from India, with my 3-year-old. The long flights are something that both of us dread equally. And at times, it became quite challenging for us. But using the multi-city flights booking option helped us both calm our nerves. I’m glad MakeMyTrip made it so simple.” 

 

This was an e-mail we received from Swati after the launch which basically made all the hard work worth it. We knew the benefits of creating this feature—adding more to the travel experience at cheaper prices, but this was one use case we had not thought of earlier! Positive feedback like this and keeping a constant check on customer responses further inspires us to keep improving. 

 

We always have two options. Either we keep doing what we’re doing and continue to do it well. Or we can be curious, ask questions and open our minds to more—this is what drives us out of our comfort zone and that’s where innovation happens.