MakeMyTrip confers $15mn Series B Capital to HolidayIQ

HolidayIQ, India's travel community and holidays recommendation engines, will raise its next round of capital from MakeMyTrip, one of the leading online travel companies of India. The funds will be mainly used to further strengthen its capabilities on content, mobile and product.
Speaking on the investment, Deep Kalra, Founder and Group CEO, MakeMyTrip.com said, “HolidayIQ operates in a very exciting space in the Indian online travel market. Their pace and appetite for innovation matches ours and we see great synergy in our focus on hotels and mobile. The opportunity to drive scale jointly is fairly significant.”

HolidayIQ lists over 2,000 tourism destinations and 50,000+ accommodation options; namely hotels, resorts, home-stays, jungle camps and serviced apartments in India. All of these are bookable through over 1600 partnerships with leading online travel agencies like MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Expedia and offline players such as Thomas Cook and SOTC among others.

Hari Nair, Founder and CEO of HolidayIQ said, “Mobile is creating new unprecedented opportunities for growth and innovation. This capital gives us additional resources to expand quickly and strategically, and thus accelerate pace of product innovation. We look forward to working closely with MakeMyTrip in getting a much larger number of Indian travellers to participate in the creation of Indian traveller opinion.”

Makemytrip.com is a comprehensive travel website that has evolved into a full-service portal extending its offerings to online hotel-reservations, holiday-package bookings, and rail and bus ticket bookings. The website had an average of over 7.8 million unique visitors per month in fiscal year 2015. With over seven million downloads (to date), MakeMyTrip's mobile app is one of the most widely used travel apps in India.