EaseMyTrip makes its first acquisition in 13 years to strengthen its hotel offerings

• Traviate enables peer-to-peer transactions among hotels, online travel agencies, travel agents and others.
• The acquisition would result in better cost efficiency translated into cost savings for the customers.
• The company had doubled its net profit to ₹61.4 crore in the financial year 2021.

Online travel platform Easy Trip Planner — which goes by the name EaseMyTrip — has acquired business-to-business travel marketplace Traviate.

This is EaseMyTrip’s first acquisition.

Traviate — founded in 2016 by Pranita Baveja — enables peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions among hotels, online travel agencies, travel agents and others. The company has over 1.2 million hotels listed on its platform and claims to have enabled more than 200,000 transactions since its inception.

The five-year-old startup claims that 70% of the hotel’s inventory is sold by the business-to-business (B2B) channels.

The acquisition would help EaseMyTrip scale up its hotel and holiday business, and also result in better cost efficiency translated into cost savings for the customers. “There is a synergy between EaseMyTrip and Traviate where we leverage cutting-edge technology to build a lean and efficient infrastructure,” Rikant Pittie, co-founder of EaseMyTrip said.

EaseMyTrip — which has a market cap of ₹5,345 crore as of October 28 — aims to further strengthen its B2B offerings with this acquisition.

Founded in 2008 by Nishant Pitti, Prashant Pitti and Rikant Pitti, EaseMyTrip offers deals on flight booking, hotels and holiday packages. The company has been one of the few bootstrapped startups to hit the public market and has been profitable as well.

The company even doubled its net profit to ₹61.4 crore in the financial year 2021, when the entire travel segment was brought down to its knees due to COVID-19. Its revenue, however, declined to ₹150 crore from ₹181 crore reported in FY20.

EaseMyTrip’s shares have jumped 134% since its listing in March 2021. It also touched ₹7,300 crore ($1 billion) market cap in September, when its shares were trading at ₹714.

The company provides users access to more than 400 international and domestic airlines, over 1 million hotels as well as train/bus tickets and taxi rentals for major cities in India. It has set up offices in India, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, UAE, UK and USA.

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