New Delhi: AI adoption is going up in the travel and hospitality sectors as customers look for more intuitive and personalised recommendations for trips and bookings.
On Monday, Mastercard announced the launch of ‘Lifestyle Navigator’, an AI-powered travel and lifestyle concierge with MakeMyTrip. The company said it brings together MakeMyTrip’s travel marketplace and content ecosystem and its GenAI Trip Planning Assistant, Myra with Mastercard’s AI capabilities and aims to deepen personalization through curated travel experiences and a global network of offers.
The solution represents Mastercard’s first-ever global deployment of this white label platform, making India the first market worldwide and MakeMyTrip the first OTA partner. Last month, MakeMyTrip also announced that it will collaborate with OpenAI to 'deepen' AI-led travel discovery and capture high intent travel queries. The company said as part of this collaboration, it will use OpenAI’s APIs to power new AI features in its app. Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group CEO of MakeMyTrip said the company has been investing in every possible step of the funnel when it comes to AI.
“We already have the proprietary data of over 85 million consumers who have transacted with us. We are working hard on the personalisation journey to ensure that very relevant preferences are presented for every possible cohort and customer segment every single time they visit us,” said Magow. “AI will help us go deeper and solve these problems because now we can build the intelligence layer on top of the proprietary data that we already have,” he added.
Shruti Shibulal, executive vice chair of the board of directors at Tamara Leisure Experiences has co-founded Anticipatory, an AI-first platform built by hoteliers for hoteliers. Shibulal said AI in hospitality can be used across three major areas such as revenue, operational and guest intelligence. “In India, most organisations are trying to leverage AI in fairly fragmented ways which is natural because looking at it at an enterprise level is very difficult,” said Shibulal.
“Anticipatory is building solutions for the hospitality industry and it’s almost like creating an organisational layer for hotels. These are not SaaS solutions but should be perceived as organisational team members by the industry,” she added. Anticipatory’s AI agents range from call supervisors to sentiment and reputation managers. Shibulal said the most compelling of them all is the ‘strategy analyst’ that can function like a consultant for general managers.
“Imagine a general manager having access to a McKinsey-like consultant. The AI strategy analyst can guide the general managers on running their business at every step of the way, ranging from assessing guest feedback across all social media platforms to comparing branding messaging and communications with their key competitors,” she said.
For RateGain, the work in AI has evolved from deploying standalone capabilities to embedding intelligence across the entire commercial stack that powers travel and hospitality, said Bhanu Chopra, founder and managing director, RateGain.
Chopra said the focus has been on solving challenges such as fragmented demand signals, distribution complexity, and manual commercial workflows, besides integrating AI directly into acquisition, pricing, distribution, and guest engagement.
At the distribution infrastructure layer, the company has launched Agentic Smart ARI, which re-engineers how rate and availability updates flow across channels to help hotels have their most updated rate decisions distributed in a flash.
“We are also investing in the next frontier of AI led commerce. Through our MCP integration, booking engines can connect directly with AI assistants, making properties AI discoverable and AI bookable as travel discovery increasingly shifts toward conversational interfaces,” he added.
ixigo also expanded its collaboration with OpenAI last month. The company said it will help accelerate AI integration across ixigo, ConfirmTkt and Abhibus.It also announced the launch of HELLO (Hotel Extranet for Listing, Loading and Operations), an AI-powered platform designed to simplify hotel listings, content management and day-to-day operations for accommodation partners.
The company said hotel brands and chains such as Zone by The Park Hotels, Suba Hotels, Clarks Hotels, Treebo Hotels, Udman Hotels, Mastiff Hotels, and Lords Hotels & Resorts have already been onboarded on HELLO.
On Monday, Mastercard announced the launch of ‘Lifestyle Navigator’, an AI-powered travel and lifestyle concierge with MakeMyTrip. The company said it brings together MakeMyTrip’s travel marketplace and content ecosystem and its GenAI Trip Planning Assistant, Myra with Mastercard’s AI capabilities and aims to deepen personalization through curated travel experiences and a global network of offers.
The solution represents Mastercard’s first-ever global deployment of this white label platform, making India the first market worldwide and MakeMyTrip the first OTA partner. Last month, MakeMyTrip also announced that it will collaborate with OpenAI to 'deepen' AI-led travel discovery and capture high intent travel queries. The company said as part of this collaboration, it will use OpenAI’s APIs to power new AI features in its app. Rajesh Magow, co-founder and group CEO of MakeMyTrip said the company has been investing in every possible step of the funnel when it comes to AI.
“We already have the proprietary data of over 85 million consumers who have transacted with us. We are working hard on the personalisation journey to ensure that very relevant preferences are presented for every possible cohort and customer segment every single time they visit us,” said Magow. “AI will help us go deeper and solve these problems because now we can build the intelligence layer on top of the proprietary data that we already have,” he added.
Shruti Shibulal, executive vice chair of the board of directors at Tamara Leisure Experiences has co-founded Anticipatory, an AI-first platform built by hoteliers for hoteliers. Shibulal said AI in hospitality can be used across three major areas such as revenue, operational and guest intelligence. “In India, most organisations are trying to leverage AI in fairly fragmented ways which is natural because looking at it at an enterprise level is very difficult,” said Shibulal.
“Anticipatory is building solutions for the hospitality industry and it’s almost like creating an organisational layer for hotels. These are not SaaS solutions but should be perceived as organisational team members by the industry,” she added. Anticipatory’s AI agents range from call supervisors to sentiment and reputation managers. Shibulal said the most compelling of them all is the ‘strategy analyst’ that can function like a consultant for general managers.
“Imagine a general manager having access to a McKinsey-like consultant. The AI strategy analyst can guide the general managers on running their business at every step of the way, ranging from assessing guest feedback across all social media platforms to comparing branding messaging and communications with their key competitors,” she said.
For RateGain, the work in AI has evolved from deploying standalone capabilities to embedding intelligence across the entire commercial stack that powers travel and hospitality, said Bhanu Chopra, founder and managing director, RateGain.
Chopra said the focus has been on solving challenges such as fragmented demand signals, distribution complexity, and manual commercial workflows, besides integrating AI directly into acquisition, pricing, distribution, and guest engagement.
At the distribution infrastructure layer, the company has launched Agentic Smart ARI, which re-engineers how rate and availability updates flow across channels to help hotels have their most updated rate decisions distributed in a flash.
“We are also investing in the next frontier of AI led commerce. Through our MCP integration, booking engines can connect directly with AI assistants, making properties AI discoverable and AI bookable as travel discovery increasingly shifts toward conversational interfaces,” he added.
ixigo also expanded its collaboration with OpenAI last month. The company said it will help accelerate AI integration across ixigo, ConfirmTkt and Abhibus.It also announced the launch of HELLO (Hotel Extranet for Listing, Loading and Operations), an AI-powered platform designed to simplify hotel listings, content management and day-to-day operations for accommodation partners.
The company said hotel brands and chains such as Zone by The Park Hotels, Suba Hotels, Clarks Hotels, Treebo Hotels, Udman Hotels, Mastiff Hotels, and Lords Hotels & Resorts have already been onboarded on HELLO.
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