Field notes · 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 never says this out loud. They just nod, go home, and check the reviews themselves.

This is the trust leak that defines agent-mediated travel in India. The agent has expertise the customer genuinely needs, and the customer has anxiety the agent could genuinely reduce. But the commission structure sits between them like a tax on every sentence the agent says. The recommendation cannot land at full weight, because the customer has no way to know what part of it is judgment and what part of it is incentive.

Almost every Indian travel business is structured to make this worse. The agent earns more when the customer books a longer trip or a more expensive hotel, and more again when the supplier behind that hotel pays higher commission. The customer learns this within one or two interactions and adjusts accordingly. The trust premium that should exist in a category where the customer is buying anxiety transfer gets leaked, sentence by sentence, to the supplier through the commission flow.

The structural answer is to move the agent to the customer's side of the table. That means paying advisors a salary rather than a commission, disclosing openly what the company earns on every line item, and being willing to tell a customer not to book a trip, or to book a smaller one, or to use a competitor for a leg the company cannot service well. The economics look painful from the inside, because conversion rates on individual conversations fall. They look very different from the outside, because the customer stops subtracting from every recommendation.

The version of this that already exists in Indian travel lives in the content layer rather than the booking layer. A small number of creators have built audiences and businesses by being structurally free of the commission distortion. Life with the Singh Sisters on Instagram, run by Amrit and Simi, is one of the clearest examples. They grew a 147,000-follower audience by sharing practical, specific travel content, and then turned that audience into a business by selling itineraries directly to travellers through DIYtinerary. Over eight thousand travellers have paid them for the planning itself. Their stated position is that the goal of an itinerary is to show what a trip actually takes to work, including realistic budgets and the planning mistakes most travellers walk into.

The structural move underneath the business is the important part. By selling the itinerary directly to the traveller, the Singh Sisters skip the commission flow entirely. The customer pays the advisor, which puts the customer in the principal seat. That alignment is what most agent-mediated travel still does not have, and it is what their audience is paying for, even if they would not phrase it that way.

This is the gap ScoreMyTrip.in is built into. You upload your itinerary or quote, and the product runs a forty-two-point audit across six dimensions, including pricing against the market, contract fairness, stay quality, and logistics. The output is a score with each finding tied to a specific day, clause, or hotel in your plan, plus a ready-to-send WhatsApp script you can put to your operator before you pay. The product does not book the trip and does not take affiliate commissions from operators. The audit is the product, which keeps it on the customer's side of the table by design.

The Indian travel customer has been carrying the cost of commission distortion for so long that most have stopped noticing it. They collect suspiciously similar quotes from a handful of operators and book the cheapest one anyway, because the alternative is more research than they have time for. They assume every recommendation is half-true and half-sale, and they price that assumption into every conversation.

A product that removes the discount the customer is silently applying to every recommendation is worth more to them than they will say in a survey. The travel companies that figure out how to deliver it, by structurally separating advice from commission flow, will build the trust default for the next generation of Indian travellers. The ones that keep optimising the conversion funnel on a supplier-side agent will keep wondering why their CAC keeps rising while their reviews stay middling.

Trust in this category is a compensation problem dressed as a marketing problem. Fix the compensation, and the trust premium that has been leaking to suppliers for thirty years starts compounding for the company that owns the customer-side seat.