Access the full data and references used in this episode below.

Please open this alongside the episode while watching.

Open Reference Document

I put Rajesh Magow, the chartered accountant who co-founded MakeMyTrip on a team where almost nobody knew travel, and Puneet Chhatwal, the Delhi boy who spent twenty-eight years running hotels in Europe before coming home to pull IHCL out of a decade of losses, into one room to explain the business of Indian travel from scratch, and what came out was far bigger than a lesson, from why boutique hotels are better built by outsiders and how a fifty crore partnership between their companies became twelve hundred, to what a hotel actually pays to sit on MakeMyTrip and why booking direct still isn't cheaper, why ChatGPT can't scrape its way into the travel funnel and where voice bookings are taking tier-three India, why Puneet thinks the answer for a 25-year-old isn't another app but a small, clean hotel, why only ten million foreigners visit a country with more than forty UNESCO sites, what went wrong in Goa and where the next thirty Goas should be, why tourism being a state subject is the real bottleneck, and the full playbook both of them would run to take India from ten million tourists to a hundred million.

Timestamp:

00:00 Introduction

07:03 Getting to Know the Guests

14:30 How MakeMyTrip’s Hotel Partnerships Work

21:45 Booking Direct vs Travel Apps

28:26 Puneet Chhatwal’s Journey from Delhi to Europe

35:01 Building Villa Stays & Solo Travel Businesses

41:43 Will AI Change How We Book Travel?

48:40 Customer Data vs Personal Hospitality

55:43 Can Robots Replace Hotel Staff?

1:03:05 Bringing Small-Town India into Online Travel

1:09:52 Should Hotels Cut Out the Middleman?

1:16:37 India’s Mid-Range Hotel Opportunity

1:23:51 Marketing India & Fixing Tourism Taxes

1:30:46 Mass Tourism vs Luxury Tourism in Goa

1:38:26 Can Luxury Trains Attract Premium Tourists?

1:44:44 Civic Sense & the Tourist Experience

1:51:24 Making India’s Attractions Discoverable & Bookable

1:58:44 Alibaug’s Potential & the Homestay Business

2:05:56 Why Celebrations Are Driving Villa Bookings

2:13:42 What Travel Business Should a 25-Year-Old Start?

2:19:43 Handling Bad Experiences & Building Trust

2:27:16 Nandan Nilekani & the Shift to Hotel Branding

2:34:40 What It Takes to Run an Asset-Light Hotel Brand

2:41:13 The Wellness Hotel Opportunity

2:48:44 Building Travel Businesses for Gen Z

2:56:16 Travel Education & New Business Ideas

3:02:19 Unlocking Unexplored India

3:08:42 Building New Destinations & Event Tourism

3:15:38 Private Jet Economics & Closing Thoughts

Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip Limited

LinkedIn: Rajesh Magow

Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL)

LinkedIn: Puneet Chhatwal

Nikhil Kamath — Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas

Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast

Watch 'WTF is' Podcast on Spotify

Spotify

#WTFiswithnikhilkamath #PeopleByWTF #WTFOnline

Will ChatGPT Book Your Next Holiday? | MakeMyTrip x Taj Hotels | WTF is Travel?

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Will ChatGPT Book Your Next Holiday? | MakeMyTrip x Taj Hotels | WTF is Travel?