MakeMyTrip To Invest $15 Mn In HolidayIQ In Series B

HolidayIQ, travel and holiday information portal has tied-up with Makemytrip, an Online Travel Company. In lieu of this deal, MakeMyTrip will be investing $15Mn in HolidayIQ. Company plans to use the proposed funding to mainly strengthen its Content, Mobile and Product services.

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.”

Bangalore-based, HolidayIQ was founded by Siad Hari Nair in 2006.It is a holiday information portal enabling travellers to first discover numerous vacation choices, then plan holiday trips in full detail and finally, share holiday experiences with millions of other travellers. Earlier this year, HolidayIQ had raised series A round of funding from Tiger Global and Accel Partners

Currently, HolidayIQ has over 1Mn holiday reviews from Indian travellers and the count is expected to grow multi-fold over the next two years. It offers many interesting product innovations, such as offline guides for 1300 Indian destinations, country’s first mobile only holidays marketplace and reviews for journey options.

Said Hari Nair, Founder & CEO of HolidayIQ said, “This capital gives us additional resources for quickly and strategic expansion to accelerate the pace of product innovation. We are also looking forward to work closely with Makemytrip in getting a much larger number of Indian travellers to participate in the creation of Indian traveller opinion.”

Gurgaon-based MakeMyTrip (India) Private Limited was launched in September 2005, as the first comprehensive travel website with real time booking for flights. Over time, the website has evolved into a full-service portal extending its offerings to online hotel-reservations, holiday-package bookings, and rail & bus ticket bookings.

Commenting on the partnership with HolidayIQ , Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and CEO-India, MakeMyTrip.com said, “This tie-up will power our hotel-growth strategy, and also provide immense value to Indian travellers in the form of user generated and curated trip-planning content. We also expect to rapidly scale our reviews and recommendation engine as an outcome of this investment.”

Currently, The website had an average of over 7.8Mn unique visitors per month in fiscal year 2015. With over 7Mn downloads, MakeMyTrip’s mobile app is the most widely used travel app in India, and is available across platforms (iOS, Android, Windows & Blackberry).

Considering the huge user base of MakeMyTrip and HolidayIQ’s innovative approach, this partnership holds the potential to revolutionise travel industry.

Few Months Back, MakeMyTrip had also invested in a customizable itinerary planning startup Inspirock to enhance MakeMyTrip’s online tour planning experience.

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