Skift Take
Yatra has been growing its corporate travel offerings, and its domestic air passengers increased significantly as the company is gaining market share in this segment. Now, the company is set to focus on its hotel segment to grow further.
Online travel agency Yatra is working to expand its corporate share and enhancing its services to expand its total market, CEO Dhruv Shringi said on Friday.
In fiscal 2024, the company signed 83 new corporate clients with an annual billing potential of INR 5.4 billion ($64.7 million).
Enhancing its offerings, the company has launched a new expense management solution for small, medium, and large enterprises. According to Yatra, the generative AI-powered solution aims to ensure accurate and comprehensive expense tracking in order to reduce errors and save time. It is meant to help businesses handle their travel and non-travel expenses, âwhile offering a seamless integration of travel bookings and expense tracking,â the company said.
“The expense management is a large and highly profitable segment and our product capabilities make it a product that is suitable not just for the Indian market, but for international markets as well,” Shringi said during an earnings call on Friday.
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Yatra has also launched a new guesthouse booking platform for its corporate clients. The platform can integrate guesthouses contracted by both Yatra and the respective corporate in a single view, along with real-time inventory. “By offering guest houses, we provide customers the option of being able to optimize their lodging spend,” the CEO said.
Focus for 2024-25
While continuing to scale its corporate business, Yatra said it would also focus on growing its hotels business, both for customers and corporate clients. The company said it has also hired a team to scale hotels in the corporate travel segment.
âWe are actively pitching hotels to our current corporate customers, and we should see meaningful improvement in growth in hotels in the second half of this year,â Shringi said.
He said work is also on to enhance and modernize the hotel platform of the company.
In fiscal 2024, the company recorded bookings in the hotels and packages segment worth INR 8.74 billion ($105 million), up from INR 8.15 billion ($98 million) in the previous year. However, the hotel room nights booked declined from nearly 1.8 million in 2022-23 to 1.7 million in 2023-24.
Yatra 2024 Earnings: Key Points
- The company recorded a 12% annual growth in gross bookings.
- Yatra revamped its domestic flight booking flow to enable better upselling and cross selling of supplementary products. The new booking flow includes a multi-fare option, premium seat selection, as well as travel insurance at the point of booking.
- Its domestic air passengers increased by 24% year-on-year. Yatra said this was twice the industry growth and the company is continuing to gain market share in this segment.
- In the fourth quarter, the company signed 25 new corporate clients. The companyâs corporate business segment has recovered to pre-Covid levels.
