Field notes · 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 loved. They might mention a hotel brand like Taj, or an Airbnb experience that stood out. They almost certainly will not name a holiday operator.

This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable output of an industry that has, for structural reasons, systematically avoided building brands, and has paid for it in customer loyalty, pricing power, and lifetime value.

Understanding why it happened is the first step to understanding what it would take to change it.

What a Brand Actually Is

Before diagnosing the problem, it helps to be precise about what a brand is, because the word is used loosely enough to mean almost anything.

A brand is a promise that a customer believes before the transaction happens. It is the set of expectations about quality, values, and what the experience will feel like that a customer carries into their first interaction with a company. A strong brand means the customer arrives already trusting you. Without one, trust has to be earned from scratch on every transaction.

A logo, a tagline, a colour palette: these are expressions of a brand. The brand itself is what lives in the customer's mind, the accumulated impression formed by every interaction, every story heard from a friend, every experience had. Building a brand is therefore a business design exercise, not a marketing one. The brand is the output of every decision the company makes: about the product, the service quality, the communication, and the values it lives by when things go wrong.

By this definition, most Indian travel operators have names and logos. The distinction between a name and a brand matters enormously.

Why the Industry Defaulted to Transactions

The Indian outbound travel market grew up in an era of information scarcity and offline distribution. Customers did not discover travel operators through content, community, or reputation. They discovered them through a relative's referral, a newspaper advertisement, or a branch they walked past. The transaction was the first touchpoint. There was no pre-transaction brand relationship to build.

In this environment, the operator's job was to close. Every interaction was a sales interaction. The question in every conversation was how to convert the inquiry today rather than how to build a relationship over time. The mental model was transactional from the start.

This shaped everything downstream. Operators hired salespeople rather than relationship managers. They measured bookings rather than satisfaction scores. They invested in branch locations and newspaper ads, channels designed to generate leads rather than build trust. The entire business architecture was optimised for the transaction.

When the internet arrived and distribution moved online, the mental model stayed fixed. MakeMyTrip and Cleartrip became the digital equivalent of the newspaper ad: lead generation channels. The customer acquired through performance marketing was still treated as a booking to be closed rather than a person to be won.

The Unit Economics of Transaction-First Thinking

Transaction-first thinking has a specific unit economics consequence that compounds over time.

A business optimised for transactions invests heavily in acquisition and minimally in retention. The result is high acquisition costs and low repeat rates, with the business needing to constantly replace churning customers with new ones. In a rapidly growing market, this is survivable. When the total addressable market is expanding fast enough, you can build a business by continuously acquiring the next wave of first-time international travellers.

The problem arrives when growth slows. The easy first-time traveller segment gets acquired. Acquisition costs rise as more operators compete for the same leads. The customer who has already been to Bali and Switzerland is harder to acquire than the one who has never travelled internationally: more discerning, less responsive to generic campaigns, and more likely to already have an operator relationship they trust.

At that point, the businesses with strong brands have a structural advantage that no amount of performance marketing spend can replicate. The operators who recognised this early are building the things that generate compounding returns. The ones who did not are finding their acquisition costs rising while their lead quality falls.

Indian travel is approaching this inflection point.

The Airbnb Case Study

Airbnb is the most instructive example of what a travel brand can look like when built intentionally.

In 2008, Airbnb was an air mattress rental service. By 2019, it was one of the most recognised consumer brands in the world, with a level of customer affection that most travel companies never achieve and most hotel chains would trade their loyalty programmes for.

Airbnb spent almost nothing on traditional advertising in its first decade. What built the brand was the product itself: an experience people had not had before, delivered consistently enough that the community it created became the marketing. The "belong anywhere" positioning was not a tagline imposed on the product. It was a compression of what the product actually delivered. Because the product delivered it consistently, the positioning was credible.

The brand and the product were the same thing. This is the lesson Indian travel operators have not absorbed.

The operator who invests in marketing before investing in product quality is building a credibility problem: a gap between promise and delivery that customers notice, talk about, and remember. A brand cannot be built on top of a product that does not earn it.

What It Would Actually Take

The components of a genuinely loved Indian travel brand are visible. What is missing is the willingness to make decisions that are expensive in the short term in exchange for returns that are large but delayed.

Product quality as the foundation. The brand starts with the product, not the marketing. Customers forgive failures that are handled well. They do not forgive failures that are obviously the result of corner-cutting, and they do not forget them. The operator who wants to build a brand starts by asking: would I be comfortable if every customer described their trip publicly? If the answer is no, the brand work starts with the product.

A specific customer over a wide one. The most common brand-building mistake in Indian travel is trying to serve everyone: every destination, every budget, every travel style. A catalogue is not a brand. The brands that work are specific. They stand for something that not everyone wants, which is precisely why the people who want it seek out that operator specifically. An operator who is explicitly for the 28-35 Indian couple who wants to travel beyond the obvious destinations, who cares about quality over cost, and who wants an operator they can trust with the trip they have been planning for two years, has a brand positioning. Everything else follows from serving that person exceptionally well.

Owned community over paid acquisition. The most durable travel brands are built on community: people who share a travel philosophy or a set of experiences that the brand organises around. Building this requires content, genuine investment in the post-trip relationship, and consistency over time. A newsletter that tells customers something worth knowing about the places they have been or are going. An annual gathering for past customers. A channel where travellers who have done similar trips exchange recommendations. None of these are expensive to build. All of them are time-intensive to build authentically. The operators who build them are investing in the one asset no competitor can easily replicate.

Consistency at every touchpoint. A brand is built from the accumulation of small interactions: the WhatsApp response that arrives within two hours, the itinerary document that looks like someone cared about it, the check-in message on the first day, the follow-up call a week after the customer returns. No single touchpoint makes a brand. All of them together, consistently, over hundreds of customers and several years, make a reputation. And reputation, accumulated, becomes brand. This is the hardest part, not because any individual touchpoint is difficult to get right, but because consistency at scale requires systems, culture, and leadership commitment that are genuinely hard to sustain as a business grows.

The Window

The Indian outbound travel market is at an early enough stage that the brand category is genuinely open.

Thomas Cook and SOTC have brand awareness built on decades of presence, but awareness is not affection. They are known, not loved. The new digital operators have neither. The market has no equivalent of what Taj Hotels is in hospitality: a brand so associated with a particular experience and a particular set of values that customers seek it out rather than finding it through a search engine.

That position is available. It is not going to be available indefinitely. As the market matures, as more operators compete for the same customer, as digital distribution commoditises lead generation further, the window for building a brand-first travel business in India will narrow.

The operators who move now, who make the decision that brand is the strategy rather than an afterthought, are playing for a position that compounds over years. The ones who do not will find that acquisition costs and competitive pressure make the treadmill increasingly expensive to stay on.