Born in 2000, MakeMyTrip.com is a leading Indian online travel company that has literally transformed the way Indians travel today. With its roots in the US-India travel market, the company now represents the choice and ease enjoyed by Indian travellers today in planning getaways and journeys by way of facilities such as instant booking. To innovate and create a facility to match the ever-changing requirements of the evolving Indian tourist, Make My Trip launched a new service offering, namely, the Make My Trip online bus booking service. The offering is poised to offer ticketing services to frequent luxury and Volvo bus travellers.

Challenges

A foremost challenge that Make My Trip faced in this fresh area of operation was the presence of existing competitors. It was a new domain where other travel and tourism companies have already secured a prominent share. Hence, the proposition was to create awareness by capitalising on the well-established brand Make My Trip’s popularity among online users.

Being a travel and booking website, Make My Trip has traditionally invested significant sums on online advertising. As part of their advertising initiatives, they also invest heavily in outdoor hoarding spaces, which are mostly located within city limits. However, it was felt that these exercises were not producing utmost results, and so the company was on the lookout for more avenues of dynamic OOH. In pursuance, Make My Trip decided to take Vritti i-Media onboard after researching about the company online. They became convinced about the effectiveness of the medium and tried to explore a new form of OOH advertising with Vritti i-Media. The intent was to connect with travellers who frequently used luxury bus service.

Execution and Success

To reach the identified target market groups namely, inter-city high-end travellers, highway food malls were believed to be the most appropriate location for advertising as most luxury intercity buses halted at them for breaks and refreshments.

Since the task for Vritti i-Media was to create awareness about the new service of Make My Trip, the company planned to take a 360-degree branding approach on highway food malls. This included advertising on Audio-Video displays within the mall, table branding and 20X30 information boards (hoardings) within mall premises, which would be visible to travellers alighting from buses or cars.

No specific concerns have been noted since the commencement of project implementation. In fact, Make My Trip has received a remarkable response from this exercise, which has led the company to extend the campaign for another six months.

Campaign clicks:

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