Ixigo’s “Love Train” To Success: Cracking The Code in the Indian Travel Market

In the song “Love Train”, The O’Jays called on “people all over the world, everybody, join hands, start a love train, love train”.

Well, if Aloke Bajpai, Chairman, Managing Director and Group CEO, ixigo, had his way, he’d want all of us to get onboard the ixigo train to capturing the next billion travellers – and that’s just in the Indian market.

Fresh from the spectacular success of the company’s IPO – becoming one of the most oversubscribed tech IPOs in India – Bajpai was clearly pumped up about the potential of the India travel market.

He’s waited a long time for this moment – founding his company in 2007 when online travel was just taking off in India. For years, he and co-founder Rajnish Kumar had to battle it out in a cut-throat competitive flight market and clearly, the turning point came when it went into rail.

That, along with their obsession about the customer and relentless execution, is the secret sauce of ixigo’s success, captured in this interview at WiT Singapore with Pete Comeau, managing director, Phocuswright.

The rail moment of truth

Recognising that train travel is the backbone of transportation in India, ixigo focused first on creating a platform that made booking and managing train journeys easier.

“We realised that every OTA in India was just copying the Western template of building for flights and then selling hotels. We looked at the stats like 3% of Indians were booking flights. Guess where the number is today? It’s 4%. So 96% of Indians don’t find flights as relevant for travel. Railway travel is the backbone of Indian transportation, with billions of trips annually, making it a crucial market for travel companies.

“Eight billion trips a year happen on Indian railways. About 800 million plus happen on reserve tickets, and the rest are unreserved. That’s the bloodline for India. If we were not worried about trains, we thought, you can never win this market without winning on trains.”

It started building a utility app for train travel. “We would spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy to solve those pain points, whether it meant how to track a train better or whether your waitlisted PNR would confirm or not, giving them the probability of that with machine learning.

“If you build something that people want, which they’ve been dying to get hold of, you will start seeing organic traction. When we first built the train app, in the first year we got a million downloads. The next year, we got 10 million downloads.”

He added, “About 60% of new flyers being added are people who already travel by train or bus. If you want to win flights in India, you need to start by winning trains.”

Watch out for that fast train when inflection point arrives

Of course, it helps that the travel market is outpacing India’s GDP growth.

“GDP is growing at about 6-7%, but the OTA market is growing at about 18%. The overall travel market will grow 9-10%, OTAs will grow almost double of that. Almost every category out there is going to double within five years,” said Bajpai.

“India’s travel market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by economic expansion and increasing disposable income in tier 2 and 3 cities.

“The point of inflection will arrive when the GDP per capita of our country crosses $4,000. We’re at close to $3,000 mark right now. It’s going to take less than five years to get to that $4,000 GDP per capita mark. When that happens, then it’s not just the Bombay and the Gurgaon of the world which are driving discretionary growth. Then you’re seeing the next 500 cities driving discretionary income growth.”

This rising tide is lifting all boats. “All airlines in India are profitable, big or small. All OTAs in India are profitable right now, big or small, except maybe one or two,” he said.

The growth track in spirituality and religious tourism

India’s travel market isn’t just growing in size; it’s also diversifying. Outbound travel is booming, with Indians now ranking among the top inbound tourists for numerous countries. Visa-free and visa-on-arrival access to over 60 countries has made international travel more accessible, with Indian travellers spending $17 billion abroad last year.

Bajpai called out trends such as spiritual tourism as a powerful force driving domestic travel. Major pilgrimage sites like Ayodhya, which now attracts over 150,000 daily visitors, and Varanasi, with its revamped infrastructure, highlight the scale of demand for religious tourism.

Bajpai describes spiritual tourism as an “underserved market” in India.

Obsess about customers, not competitors – monetisation can wait too

Through all the changes, one things has stayed true at ixigo, said Bajpai – the focus on the customer.

During the pandemic, when refunds were delayed across the industry, ixigo took the bold step of reimbursing customers before receiving funds from suppliers. Bajpai recalled, “We even crowdsourced money from employees to ensure customers got their refunds quickly. It’s not just about putting customer obsession on a wall; it’s about proving it.”

A winning product launched during the pandemic was ixigo Assured, a product that guarantees refunds regardless of airline policies.

Bajpai notes, “We started hiring people when others were laying off, and we created products that would give customers peace of mind.”

ixigo also invested in automated customer support, with 87% of inquiries managed through AI systems and recent expansions into voice-based AI handling hundreds of hours of calls daily. These systems not only streamline support but also allow ixigo to focus on high-value, personalized customer interactions.

Bajpai emphasized that understanding consumer behaviour is more valuable than obsessing over what the competition is doing. “The best use of your time is actually in understanding consumer behaviour,” he said.

This focus on problem-solving has also influenced ixigo’s approach to monetization. “Whenever we solved any problem, we never cared about monetization or even transactions on day one. We said, what are those consumer pain points that are worth solving? And we would spend disproportionate amount of time and energy to solve those pain points. For many years, we didn’t monetize anything.”

Bajpai is most excited about the transformation of India’s digital payments landscape, which has moved an entire population online.

“India is singularly the biggest payments market in the world right now by volume. We’re doing 15 billion transactions on UPI in a month. This is bigger than China. $238 billion being processed. And this is a free payment method,” he said.

Reflecting on its long journey from meta search to OTA, flights to trains and buses, Bajpai said, “We did think that at some point, we would get to be a large company. We just felt that if we gave it enough time and attention in terms of understanding consumer behaviour and building the right things, we had the right to build a large company. It just took longer than what we imagined it would.”

As American comedian and actor Eddie Cantor once said, “it takes 20 years to make an overnight success.”