Yatra Online Ltd. will continue its expansion in hotels as margins trend to be much higher, according to Chief Executive Officer Dhruv Shringi.
Hotels are one of the key focus areas for products to be cross-sold to the corporate customer base, he said.
On Monday, for the first time since listing in September, the company reported a rise in its first-quarter gross booking value. The company also signed 19 new corporate customers in Q1, with an annual billing potential of Rs 151 crore.
Gross booking value rose 11% year-on-year to Rs 1,983.2 crore, compared to the previous year’s Rs 1,785.8 crore.
“The domestic aviation industry grew by 14.8% year-on-year, while our domestic flight business has grown upwards of 42-43%,” Shringi told BQ Prime after the release of Q1 results.
“The second half of the year will also see the IPO proceeds being baked in and deployed, which will further strengthen our margins. We expect performance to improve in the second half of the year compared to the first half,” he said.
Driving cross-selling across the large and sticky corporate customer base will be the first lever of growth, Shringi said. Yatra has seen good traction for hotels in the last year, and they see incremental demand coming for cabs and insurance as well, the CEO said.
Organisations today are making a big move to digitise business processes such as procurement, HR, and expense management solutions, according to him. India is going through a large wave of digitisation and travel and expense management is a core component of that. So, Yatra sees benefits from that coming in as well, Shringi said.
Employees of the corporates Yatra services also forms a large part of the consuming middle class of India, he said. There are about 70 lakh people who are employed by the organisations Yatra services, so they form a great catchment area to drive personal travel bookings as well, according to the CEO.
Currently, the booking split looks like 55% coming in from business-to-consume and the remainder from business-to-business, but the profitability of the B2B segment tends to be better due to its captive nature. The focus from hereon will be to drive more customer acquisitions and gain market share, so that Yatra can improve on operating margins, Shringi said.
