SUMMARY
The company has confirmed that it plans to take a legal action against the trolls, but refused to further divulge details
Most of these Twitter troll posts were from account that were opened very recently and have interactions with similar pages and threads
While Meesho’s smear campaign was routed via genuine social media users, EaseMyTrip’s trolls have no followers and even the profile pictures on the accounts are majorly sourced from random public pages and online fashion catalogues
Publicly listed travel tech startup EaseMyTrip is the latest to have been attacked by smear tweet campaigns. A quick Twitter search revealed that several Twitter accounts commenting EaseMyTrip had ‘stolen money’ and cheated them by making fraudulent offers.
The company has confirmed that it plans to take legal action against the trolls but refused to further divulge details.
Prashant Pitti, one of the three cofounders of the Delhi NCR-based bootstrapped startup stated, “We firmly think that because we are all part of the business ecosystem, we should help one another in order to promote the expansion of the entire travel sector and the nation. Hence, we are shocked by these tweets. Although this is undoubtedly disappointing, we will direct our energies on the company’s expansion and vision in order to change the tourism industry.”
The Smear Campaign Against EaseMyTrip
The issue again came to light when Testbook VP Ravisutanjani Kumar (who was also the one to bring Meesho’s smear campaign to light) shared screenshots of tweets mentioning EaseMyTrip.
According to Kumar’s post, several new accounts were made in June 2022 (the majority of them were female accounts) alleging that an EaseMyTrip competitor was defaming the startup and promoting self.
Most of these Twitter accounts were opened very recently and have interactions with similar pages, accounts and threads. They have no followers and a quick cross-check reveals that the profile pictures of the girls on the accounts are majorly sourced from random public pages and online fashion catalogues.
This is different from what happened with Meesho, where the ecommerce giant alleged that a hotshot from the social media marketing industry asked genuine users to post detailed notes against Meesho.
As for EaseMyTrip’s smear campaign, the tweets of the trolls have similar keywords and a singular theme – stating that the company cheated them with no background whatsoever.
On social media, Prashant thanked Kumar and took a jab at the smear campaign, stating that the incident has happened a couple of times in the past. “Is this is how VC/PE funded companies spend their money, against bootstrapped companies?” he tweeted.
It is to be noted that among travel tech startups in the country, EaseMyTrip is one of the profitable ones, despite not having raised funds from the private markets. In the quarter ending March 2022, the startup had reported a revenue of INR 60.8 Cr, and a profit of INR 23.34 Cr.
Founded in 2008 by brothers Prashant, Nishant and Rikant Pitti, EaseMyTrip went public in March 2021 and also briefly achieved the unicorn status when its share prices soared to over INR 700. The share of EaseMyTrip was trading at INR 362 at 1:40 PM on June 23, 2022.
