MakeMyTrip purchases Dutch hotel booking portal for Rs 30 crore
Nasdaq-listed MakeMyTrip has acquired Amsterdam-based hotel bookings portal Easytobook.com (ETB) for $5 million (Rs 30 crore). India’s ace online travel company has picked up the entire equity interest in ETB.
Deep Kalra, founder and group chief executive, MakeMyTrip.com, reportedly said that, “Like us, EasyToBook has a strong focus on technology and innovation and being a pure-play hotel site, it brings domain expertise. ETB’s rich inventory of online hotel reservations in Europe, North America and other key global travel destinations will enable us to enhance hotel offerings for our Indian customers travelling to Europe and North America.”
The latest procurement is in line with MMT’s strategy of ramping its hotel bookings business, where the margins stand higher. The enterprise had taken over Hotel Travel Group, which operated hoteltravel.com, in November. The $25-million acquisition had added 70,000 international hotels, mostly in Southeast Asia, to MMT’s inventory.
The corporation from its barrio gets most of its proceeds from airline reservations.
In the long term, it wants to accomplish equilibrium between its air and non-air revenues attributable to the wafer-thin margins in the ticketing trade.
Easytobook.com is a ten-year old company, which affords online hotel reservations across Europe and North America. Its technology development team is centered at Herzliya, Israel. “The acquisition of EasyToBook.com will add momentum to our stated objective of growing our hotel and online holidays business. As we expand our presence beyond the Southeast Asia region, we look forward to welcoming inbound customers to our hotel partners in Asia,” Kalra supplemented.
The travel company had also picked up bulk of the stake in Singapore-based tour and hotel reservation agency Luxury Tours and Travel for $3.4 million and 19.9 per cent stake in Le Travenues Technology which runs online travel aggregator iXigo.com for $4.8 million.
