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Rajesh Magow

Co-Founder & Group Chief Executive Officer, MakeMyTrip Limited

Search every verified Rajesh Magow interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group chief executive officer of MakeMyTrip, discussed the company's AI initiatives and industry outlook at several events in late 2026. At Mumbai Tech Week 2026, he introduced Myra, the company's AI-powered travel assistant, describing it as a conversational interface for trip planning, booking, and post-sales assistance. He noted that the platform was handling about 110,000 conversations per day, with over one-third related to trip planning, an area he said the company previously did not address. In a separate conversation with Nikhil Kamath and Puneet Chhatwal, Magow said he did not believe AI models could easily replicate a deep transaction business like travel booking, citing the complexity of payment and post-booking processes, and described his business as "AI-proof" due to consumer desire for real human connections during travel. On MakeMyTrip's Q1 FY2027 earnings call, Magow reported record gross bookings despite a roughly 2% market decline in the flights segment, which he called "almost unprecedented." He said the company aimed to increase market share during the downturn rather than focus on profitability. He also observed that travel in India was shifting from an occasional purchase to a recurring consumption category, with customers taking more frequent trips for leisure, family visits, pilgrimage, and short breaks. In a podcast with IHCL's Puneet Chhatwal, Magow advised a hypothetical 25-year-old entrepreneur to consider building a boutique or budget hotel business rather than an app, citing overcrowding in the AI space.

Recent appearances

  • How MakeMyTrip is enhancing your travel booking experience | Mumbai Tech Week 2026

    September 30, 2026 · 📺 Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM)

    Rajesh Magow (Co-Founder & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip) and Ankit Khanna (Chief Product Officer - Hotel, Growth & Emerging Businesses, MakeMyTrip) showcased MakeMyTrip's AI capabilities at Mumbai Tech Week 2026. Key highlights from the session: 1. An introduction to Myra, MakeMyTrip's AI-powered travel assistant. 2. How MakeMyTrip is solving for a better user experience across generations of users in India. 3. End to end trip planning simplified by MakeMyTrip. 💼 About TEAM: Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM) is a non-profit, independent industry association formed with the mission…

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  • Why A 25-Year-Old Should Build A Hotel, Not An App | MakeMyTrip x Taj | WTF is Travel?

    September 09, 2026 · 📺 Nikhil Kamath

    Access the full data and references used in this episode below. Please open this alongside the episode while watching. https://canva.link/c3kd2nq3k4f9ndy I put Rajesh Magow, the chartered accountant who co-founded MakeMyTrip on a team where almost nobody knew travel, and Puneet Chhatwal, the Delhi boy who spent twenty-eight years running hotels in Europe before coming home to pull IHCL out of a decade of losses, into one room to explain the business of Indian travel from scratch. What came out was far bigger than a lesson, from why boutique hotels are better built by outsiders and why bookin…

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  • Will AI Replace MakeMyTrip? The Founders Respond 🤖 #nikhilkamath #makemytrip #tajhotels #travel

    September 09, 2026 · 📺 Bharat Breakout

    Could ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence completely change the way we plan and book our travel? In this conversation, Nikhil Kamath, Co-founder of Zerodha, is joined by Rajesh Magow, Co-founder of MakeMyTrip, and Puneet Chhatwal, MD & CEO of IHCL (Taj Hotels) to discuss how AI could transform the travel and hospitality industry. The discussion explores the role of ChatGPT, OpenAI, Large Language Models and AI-powered travel planning, along with the future of personalised recommendations and online booking platforms. As travellers increasingly use AI to research destinations and plan their…

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  • MakeMyTrip Q1 2027 Earnings Call | Strong Travel Demand Drives Record Gross Bookings

    August 04, 2026 · 📺 i101

    MakeMyTrip Q1 2027 Earnings Call | Strong Travel Demand Drives Record Gross Bookings Twitter - https://x.com/i101yt If you find our work useful, please support us by purchasing a Super Thanks— it truly helps us a lot. #earningscall #StockMarketNews #conferenceCall Earnings Call | Earnings Conference Call | Earnings concall | concall | quarterly results | Stock News | Full Year results | Fiscal Year results | investment news | stock latest news | Annual Meeting of Shareholders | Annual Meeting of Unitholders | Special and Annual Meeting of Shareholders | AGM | Annual General Meeting If yo…

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  • BITB 2026 | Paryatan se Parivartan | Rajesh Magow

    July 14, 2026 · 📺 BITB

    BITB 2026 – Paryatan se Parivartan brings together India's leading voices from tourism, hospitality, heritage, and travel to discuss ideas shaping the future of Indian tourism. In this insightful session, Rajesh Magow, Co-founder and CEO, MMT, shares his perspectives on the evolution of India's travel industry, digital innovation, tourism growth, and the opportunities that lie ahead for the sector. 📍 Event: BITB 2026 – Paryatan se Parivartan 🎥 Presented by: BITB – Building India's Travel Businesses Subscribe for more conversations with industry leaders, tourism experts, hospitality professi…

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  • Tourism Success Stories | K B Kachru, Anil Chadha & Rajesh Magow | BITB 2026

    July 04, 2026 · 📺 BITB

    India's leading tourism and hospitality professionals share the lessons behind some of the country's most successful travel and tourism journeys. Theme Learning from India's Most Successful Tourism Journeys Panelists • K B Kachru – Chairman, Radisson Hotels India and South Asia • Anil Chadha – Managing Director, ITC • Rajesh Magow – Co-founder and CEO, MakeMyTrip Moderator • Rattan Keswani Hosted at BITB – Paryatan Se Parivartan 2026 Building India's Travel Businesses. #BITB #ParyatanSeParivartan #TourismLeadership #Hospitality #TravelIndustry #India

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  • MakeMyTrip CEO on Building an AI-Native Travel Platform

    June 04, 2026 · 📺 Signal and Tech Entrepreneurs Association of Mumbai (TEAM)

    Rajesh Magow, Co-founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip, sits down with Pratyush Choudhury at Mumbai Tech Week to break down how India's most-used travel platform is rebuilding itself as an AI-native company. Magow makes the case that MakeMyTrip has always been a tech company that happens to be in travel, and that going AI-native is a company-wide mindset shift, not an incremental upgrade. Rather than fearing that ChatGPT or Google will eat the top of the funnel, he argues conversational AI is actually an opportunity for travel platforms to finally own discovery and trip planning, not just bookin…

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  • MakeMyTrip Limited MMYT Q3 2026 Earnings Call

    January 22, 2026 · 📺 Fyfull

    --------- MakeMyTrip Limited MMYT Q3 2026 Earnings Call --------- In this video, we’ll cover the latest quarterly earnings results, key financial metrics, and business highlights from the most recent reporting period. 🔔 Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us on X for more updates: https://x.com/Fyfull2 Disclaimer: This video includes segments from official corporate earnings calls and presentations, used for educational and informational purposes under fair use (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act). No affiliation or endorsement by the companies mentioned is implied. All content rights remain…

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  • MakeMyTrip Co-founder Rajesh Magow on Scaling Through Crises & Reinventing Travel in India | EP 16

    December 09, 2025 · 📺 Innside Scoop - The Hospitality Podcast

    In this episode of The Innside Scoop, Anant Kumar sits down with Rajesh Magow - Co-Founder & Group CEO of MakeMyTrip - the ...

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  • [Weekday Ep.] How MakeMyTrip Built a ₹60,000 Cr Internet Travel Company | S4 E4 | Destiny Avenged

    November 03, 2025 · 📺 Blume Ventures

    MakeMyTrip is a Rs 60,000 crore company that, by all logic, shouldn't exist. It launched in 2000 when India's internet barely worked. Connections dropped, credit cards failed online, and most people used the internet to browse, not buy. The company faced a triple whammy of the dotcom bust, 9/11, and SARS in the early days, each hitting global travel harder than the last. Two decades later, COVID brought travel to a grinding halt—again. In between, deep-pocketed competitors launched brutal price wars that burned cash faster than revenues could grow. Desktop UX was losing ground to nimbler c…

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  • Festive Travel Picks Up Early! MakeMyTrip CEO Rajesh Magow On Diwali Booking Surge | ET Now

    October 09, 2025 · 📺 ET Now

    Festive Travel Picks Up Early! MakeMyTrip CEO Rajesh Magow On Diwali Booking Surge | ET Now MakeMyTrip's Rajesh Magow reports buoyant festive travel sentiment, with early Diwali bookings surging for domestic hotspots like Goa, Rajasthan, and Andamans, plus VFR to metros. International favorites: Dubai, Thailand, Vietnam's Phu Quoc. Spiritual tourism booms in Ayodhya, Haridwar. AI tool Myra attracts new users via voice interactions. #festivetravel #makemytrip #diwaligetaways #spiritualtourism #aitravel #diwali2025withetnow #diwaliwithetnow#indianholidays #traveltrends #etnow control your m…

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  • Inside MakeMyTrip’s AI Trip Planner | Myra Goes Multilingual | Makemytrip's Big GenAI Bet | N18V

    August 11, 2025 · 📺 CNBC-TV18

    PLANNING A HOLIDAY JUST GOT A GENAI UPGRADE 🌏✈️ From “Where should I go?” to “Booking confirmed”— all in one conversation. MakeMyTrip’s new avatar of AI trip assistant Myra is voice-enabled, multilingual & coming soon in regional languages to reach deep into Bharat. 📺 Aishwarya Anand brings you this special report from the launch, with Rajesh Magow on how AI could reshape the future of travel for India. #MakeMyTrip #GenAI #TravelTech #AI #Bharat #DigitalIndia #cnbctv18digital 🔴CNBC TV18 LIVE TV: https://youtube.com/live/P857H4ej-MQ SUBSCRIBE to our Channel: https://bit.ly/3nvEcxf ---------…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“We all know the gap between India the internet penetration in India billion people but we know how many people are actually doing online buying depending upon which category that you look at it anywhere from 7500 million to 250 million. see the gap between internet penetration or the mobile penetration and the online buying right there's huge gap and if you combine it with the macros which is that you have to have mo”

“So in the tech world, let's say the distribution layer, the discovery down to actual booking, which is effectively the channel, right? Because my view is now the discovery that was not necessarily 100% solved by verticals like us will also get solved because we will have an opportunity to build the mouth of the funnel directly. Now like today also we have 75% of the traffic coming directly on us and that comes in wit”

“I also look at our business as something which is AI-proof because with the amount of interaction with digital media as well as AI and technology that's taking place in people's life, people want something that feels real. People want real human connections. And holidays, especially getaways with your group gives you an opportunity to really disconnect from that entire social tech bubble to being in a very real perso”

“So, right now what is happening is because of let's say the cost pressure. Because if you end up continue to continuously keep using big LLMs then of course the token cost is prohibitive, right? But then there is no ... They you know, I'll tell you the reason why I don't think that replication is so easy in a deep transaction business versus a generic search business. Think about Google for example. So, Google histor”

“It's an evolving space. So, a lot of people are getting excited to use it, and we are also pushing everyone to use it. They in the you know, in our organization, that's why I was saying you know, mm AI native AI first kind of an organization because there are clear benefits. There are clear productivity gains that you can see. So, we are in that camp that we there is merit and therefore we should leverage and across ”

“The markets and the businesses will grow of course you will have to have your strategy right execution right but it will grow because India will continue to keep growing now for the next 20 years if we do all our sort of things well minus the short cycles here and there directionally that's what should happen right so there I think it's it's good news and therefore just make sure that you don't mess it up you don't g”

Other executives at MakeMyTrip Limited

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