Rajesh Magow at ET Travel Conclave, ET TravelWorld

The tourism industry in India started to see growth returning to pre-pandemic levels this year—it actually began in the last quarter of last year, but the momentum is continuing, said Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group CEO, MakeMyTrip during a fireside chat at the third Economic Times Travel & Tourism Annual Conclave and Awards held in Gurugram on November 26, 2024.

“When you look at the data, you will see that compared to the same period in 2019 pretty much all the segments have grown. We are in a good position today and the momentum is behind the industry, in terms of the sheer demand momentum backed by overall economy doing well,” Magow said, adding, “The most important part for travel and tourism industry, from a target audience standpoint—the real driving force behind the whole growth momentum is the urban middle class, the upper middle class and the HNIs”.

Speaking about what he saw in the future, Magow continued to speak about the power of the middle class with growing disposable income—there is a good number of the population that make USD 10,000 per annum and a top rung which makes USD 50,000.

One of the other big factors that was giving a lot of momentum to travel and tourism, especially domestic, was the huge infrastructure push by the government, he said.

“I don’t think we should make a mistake of comparing the travel demand with the size of our country’s population.The reality is that we should focus on about 250-300 million people. It’s a very, very big base where everything seems to be going in the right direction. Not only is there more disposable income, but they also want to spend more and explore more,” he said. Magow here also spoke about the need he put it, to ‘not get carried away’ by the momentum of the growth. There was a need to look at sustainability as well.

“We should definitely take the step back and think a little bit deeper and see whether it’s sustainable or not. The good news, as we see from the data, is that (this growth is) sustainable. It is not necessarily revenge travel or the demand that we saw right after COVID. If you see the last few quarters, you would see that it’s actually more steady. There are definitely green shoots on consumer habits and behavior changing, which are more permanent in nature,” he said.

Magow was in conversation with Manas Dwivedi, Edit Lead, ET TravelWorld.