Generative AI is shrinking the traditional travel-booking funnel, according to MakeMyTrip Group CTO Sanjay Mohan, as travellers increasingly bundle questions about flights, transit visas, payment discounts and trip preferences into a single exchange rather than moving step by step through search, selection and checkout.
Speaking at Inc42’s inaugural CTO Summit 2026, Mohan said that this change is forcing travel platforms to rethink both their interfaces and the systems that s...
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it behind them. In the conventional model, customers browse listings, compare options, enter passenger details, make payment and wait for confirmation. In an AI-led conversation, by contrast, they may surface several of those needs at once.
Mohan gave the example of a traveller asking for a flight with a short layover, no transit visa requirement and an offer linked to a particular bank card. That kind of request, he said, requires the platform to stitch together information that would previously have been spread across multiple screens and filters.
To handle this shift, MakeMyTrip is leaning on more than simple keyword search. Mohan said the company is using knowledge graphs and other meaning-based search tools so that it can infer intent, rather than waiting for users to type exact phrases. He illustrated the point with the example of a customer looking for a “serene getaway”: if that wording does not appear in a listing, the platform still needs to understand the underlying request and surface relevant properties.
The company’s in-house assistant, Myra, is central to that strategy. Mohan said Myra is built around roughly 10 to 12 specialist agents covering different travel needs, including flights and accommodation, with a coordinating layer routing tasks to the right component and combining the results. That design, he said, helps MakeMyTrip balance quality, speed and cost while avoiding the expense of sending every query to the largest and most powerful model available.
He also argued that travel is a particularly demanding category for applied AI because users want context, nuance and live information. Unlike a simple product search, a trip booking can involve preferences around the view from a hotel window, the timing of a connection, the cost of a ticket and the practicalities of visas and payment offers, all within one interaction.
Voice has become another important part of that evolution. The Economic Times reported that MakeMyTrip is seeing growing use of voice among Indian travellers, especially in smaller cities, where longer and more descriptive queries suggest a more conversational style of trip planning. Moneycontrol reported that Myra now handles more than 50,000 conversations a day, with over 45% of usage coming from Tier-2 and smaller cities, and that voice-led searches are producing a higher conversion rate than conventional filter-based browsing.
MakeMyTrip’s push into voice also reflects a broader effort to make trip planning feel less like form-filling and more like a dialogue. According to earlier reports from Gadgets360 and Business Standard, the company has also deepened its AI work through a partnership with OpenAI, aiming to move users more smoothly from inspiration and planning to booking within Myra.
Mohan’s comments suggest that travel platforms are no longer simply arranging inventory. They are increasingly being asked to interpret intent, reconcile constraints and present bookable options in real time. In that sense, AI is not just changing how people search for travel, but also what a travel search is expected to do.
Source: Noah Wire Services
