Field notes

How travel is really sold.

28 July 2026

You Compare Hotel Prices at the Wrong Step

We asked the biggest booking sites the same question about the same hotels in 65 cities. Their answers disagreed by 22 percent at the median. Your deal-hunting habit is aimed at the wrong end of the problem.

Indian travellers are the best last step price comparers in the world. You know the ritual. Shortlist the hotel, open Booking.com and MakeMyTrip side by side, check the member rate, check the mobile rate, check whether the coupon code from the credit...

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30 June 2026

The U-Shaped Customer

The two travellers least likely to plan their own trip are the poorest and the richest.

The intuitive story is a straight line. You start with packages because you do not know better, and as you get richer you graduate to arranging your own trips. The first half is true. Then the line bends back. The wealthiest travellers...

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19 June 2026

The Asterisk Is the Business Model

Why travel companies count on you not reading the brochure.

The cheapest tour wins. Almost everything an operator does to you follows from that one fact, and almost none of it is illegal. That is what makes it worth writing about. This is not a story about a few bad apples breaking...

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3 June 2026

The Travel Trust Issue

Why every recommendation in Indian travel arrives with trust issues, and what fixing it would look like.

When a travel agent recommends a hotel, the customer performs a silent calculation. They subtract some unknown amount from the recommendation, an amount they assume reflects whatever commission the agent is earning on that booking. The recommendation arrives pre discounted. The customer...

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11 May 2026

The Commission Economy

Travel pricing is a layered revenue system in which each layer is individually rational and the whole is opaque by design.

When you book a holiday, you pay one number. Behind that number is a chain of payments: commissions, overrides, markups, referral fees, and volume bonuses, flowing between the hotel, the airline, the activity operator, the visa agent, the insurance company, the B2B...

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30 April 2026

Travellers Don't Want Their 38 Tabs Replaced

Every AI travel planner I have looked at this year leads with the same pitch.

You know the one. Travel planning today means 38 browser tabs. Booking.com, Skyscanner, Reddit, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide, three blog posts, two YouTube videos, a forum thread from 2019. AI will collapse all of that into a single chat window. Type your trip, get...

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20 April 2026

The Solo Traveller Problem

The fastest-growing and most underserved segment in Indian outbound travel, and why building for it is harder than it looks.

Every travel operator in India knows solo travellers exist. Most of them don't build products for them. The ones who do typically offer one of two things: a group tour where the solo traveller joins a coach of strangers and is charged...

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15 April 2026

The True Cost of a Bad Trip

Not just refunds and complaints. The full P&L case for why quality is the most underrated margin lever in travel.

Every travel operator knows that a bad holiday is expensive. The refund negotiation, the complaint call that takes two hours, the one star review on Google that sits there permanently, the customer who never books again: they all carry a cost. What...

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10 April 2026

The Search Box Was the Wrong Answer

Every experiences platform built a search box. Nobody asked whether it was the right product.

When Viator scaled, when GetYourGuide expanded, when every travel platform added an experiences tab, they all reached for the same interface. A search box. A filter panel. A ranked list of results sorted by review score and popularity. The product looked like...

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7 April 2026

Why Europe Beats SEA on a Spreadsheet

The margin case for building toward Europe rather than Southeast Asia, and what the numbers look like when you run them properly.

Every Indian travel operator instinctively builds toward Southeast Asia. Thailand and Bali are the most searched international destinations by Indian travellers. Visa processes are straightforward. Flights are short and frequent. Customers convert faster because the destination is familiar and the price point...

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5 April 2026

Why Indian Travel Companies Don't Build Brands

How the structure of the Indian travel industry made brand-building almost impossible, and what it would actually take to change that.

Ask someone in urban India to name a travel company they genuinely love, one they would miss if it disappeared. Most people cannot answer. They will name an OTA (MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip) with the warmth they would reserve for a utility: useful, not...

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4 April 2026

The Hotel Pricing Model Is Due for Disruption

Why the pricing model the hotel industry runs on was designed for a world that no longer exists, and what replaces it.

The hotel industry runs on a pricing model designed before the internet existed. It survived the internet by adapting just enough to avoid breaking, and is now held together by a combination of inertia, contractual obligation, and the absence of anything that...

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31 March 2026

The Festival Trip as a Product

Why event-anchored travel has fundamentally different economics from standard holiday packages, and why the Indian market hasn't caught up yet.

Booking.com's 2024 Travel Trends survey found that 33% of Indian travellers intended to travel specifically for a music festival or concert that year. Not as part of a general holiday where they might catch a show. Specifically for the event. That number...

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28 March 2026

Why Your Travel Agent Still Exists

Twenty years after the internet was supposed to kill them, they are still here.

In 2005, the conventional wisdom was settled: travel agents were finished. Expedia had launched and Booking.com was growing. You could sit at a computer, compare hotel prices across fifty properties in any city on earth, and book a flight in four minutes....

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