Rails to Riches: Rail OTA leader ixigo now wants a piece of everything

In November, ixigo released its results for the financial year ended March 2023. The online travel agency (OTA) posted operating revenues of Rs 501.3 crore—a 32% jump, year-on-year.

Not only was this a 4.5X increase from the company’s pre-pandemic operating revenues of Rs 111.6 crore in the financial year ending March 2020, but it also marked the company’s return to profitability and how. The Rs 23.4 crore profit the company posted—only the second time ixigo has achieved profitability—was its largest-ever bottom line.

Of course, ixigo is hardly the only OTA seeing an uptick in fortunes, with the rising tide of post-Covid revenge travel raising most OTA boats. MakeMyTrip (MMT), for instance, has flirted with profitability and EaseMyTrip’s profit after tax stood at just north of Rs 134 crore in the same period.

Unlike its peers, however, Elevation Capital-backed ixigo has had a markedly different path to OTA success, boldly charting a course far from the typical focus areas of air ticketing and hotel bookings. While it started life as a metasearch company in 2007, aggregating and comparing information across multiple airline websites for users, it changed tracks in 2013.

Unlike its peers, Gurugram-headquartered ixigo bet big on India’s sprawling 68,000-kilometre railway network and launched a rail app in 2013. The app served various use cases for train travellers, including running PNR (passenger name record) status checks, predicting the chance of confirmation of waitlisted PNRs, helping passengers figure out platforms at stations, etc.