Startup Deep Dive : EaseMyTrip — bootstrapped for 16 years, then it booked its first loss

In March 2021, Easy Trip Planners went public without asking anyone for a rupee of growth capital. Every share sold in what was billed as India’s first online-travel-agency listing belonged to two brothers cashing out, not to the company raising money — the same brothers who, thirteen years earlier, had burned through their entire starting capital within three months of opening a travel agency out of a Delhi garage.

Five years on, EaseMyTrip has never taken a rupee of venture capital, still refuses to charge the booking fee its rivals charge, and briefly carried a stock-market value above $1 billion within months of listing. It has also just booked its first full-year loss as a public company — a company that had been profitable every year since 2008 — even as its founder-chairman cut his own shareholding from 74.9% to under 44% in three years and pledged a large chunk of what remained to a broker. This is the story of how a bootstrapped, no-frills online travel agent built two decades of discipline, and what happened once the discipline met a harder market.

Quick facts

What they do

EaseMyTrip is an online travel agency: a website and app through which Indian travellers book domestic and international flights, hotels, holiday packages, trains, buses, forex, travel insurance and visas, and through which corporate clients book business travel under a separate B2E arm. It does not own aircraft, hotels or buses. It sits between the traveller and the airline, hotel or bus operator, earning a commission or a volume-linked incentive on each transaction, and its best-known promise to that traveller is that it will not add a convenience fee on top of the fare, a charge most rivals still levy.

The origin

The founding insight, as the Pitti brothers have described it in multiple interviews, was almost accidental: Nishant Pitti and Rikant Pitti were repeatedly booking flights for their father’s business trips through travel agents and noticed how much of the fare disappeared into agent commissions and add-on charges before it ever reached the airline. Rikant had already been running a small operation, Duke Travels, while still in college. In 2008 the brothers rebranded that agency as EaseMyTrip and began selling tickets to other travel agents rather than directly to consumers — a business-to-business-to-consumer, or B2B2C, model that let a two-person outfit plug into an existing network of thousands of small agents without having to build consumer trust from scratch. Prashant Pitti, the third brother, joined later with a different résumé: an IIT Madras engineering degree and stints at Capital One and HSBC in the United States, plus a prior startup of his own, before he came back to run the finance and technology side of the family business.

The struggle years

The company’s own founders do not soften how close it came to failing more than once. In 2008, operating out of a home garage, the brothers lost their entire starting capital within the first three months — the fledgling agency simply had no bookings and no cushion. In its first few years, before EaseMyTrip broadened its own direct consumer channel in 2011, a travel agent on its B2B2C network defrauded the company by booking air tickets against fake credit cards, an overnight loss of roughly ₹26 lakh that the bootstrapped firm had no outside investor to absorb. The business survived both episodes on referrals and repeat bookings rather than capital.

The third and by far the largest shock came from outside the company altogether. India’s aviation sector effectively shut down for weeks during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and travel demand collapsed through FY2020-21. EaseMyTrip’s Gross Booking Revenue — the total value of bookings passing through its platform, not its own commission revenue — fell 49% year-on-year, from ₹4,204 crore in FY2019-20 to ₹2,128 crore in FY2020-21. For a company whose entire income depended on a share of ticket value, a near-halving of ticket volume was as close to an existential threat as it had faced since the garage years.

The turning point

What makes EaseMyTrip’s pandemic year the genuine turning point, rather than just another bad year, is what the company did in the middle of it: it went public. Even as Gross Booking Revenue nearly halved, EaseMyTrip’s net profit for FY2020-21 rose 86% year-on-year to ₹61.4 crore, aided by leaner costs and a shift in the commission mix, and the company used that same crisis year to file for and complete an IPO. The ₹510 crore issue opened on 8 March 2021 and closed on 10 March 2021, was subscribed 159.33 times overall, and listed on the BSE and NSE on 19 March 2021 at ₹212.25 a share — a 13.5% premium to its ₹187 issue price, at a moment when most of the travel industry was still counting losses. By September 2021, the stock’s run had pushed EaseMyTrip’s market capitalisation past $1 billion, an unusual outcome for a company that had never taken a rupee of venture funding to get there.

The money behind it

This is the part of EaseMyTrip’s story that is genuinely unusual for an Indian internet company: there is no funding round to describe, because there were none. From 2008 until its 2021 listing, the company grew on internal cash flow alone, without a single institutional venture-capital cheque. Even its IPO did not change that in the way most listings do. The ₹510 crore issue was structured entirely as an offer for sale — promoters Nishant Pitti and Rikant Pitti sold roughly ₹255 crore worth of their own shares each, and the company itself received no primary proceeds from the listing. The closest EaseMyTrip has come to naming institutional backers is its anchor book: ahead of the IPO, ₹229 crore of shares (45% of the issue) were allotted to anchor investors including HSBC, Nomura, Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance, Sundaram Mutual Fund and Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance. Even these were buying secondary shares from the promoters rather than injecting growth capital into the business, and none took a board seat or an operating role. What the listing did change was liquidity and visibility: EaseMyTrip could now be bought and sold on an exchange, and its founders had, for the first time, a way to convert years of paper ownership into cash — which is exactly what they went on to do at scale after 2024.

How it makes money

EaseMyTrip’s revenue is not the value of the tickets it sells; it is the sliver left over after the airline, hotel or operator is paid. On flights, that sliver includes a base commission, a performance-linked incentive from airlines and distribution partners tied to booking volumes, and payments from credit-card companies for the transactions it routes to them. On hotels, holiday packages, rail, bus, forex and visa services, the company earns a similar mix of commission and service charges, but at meaningfully higher rates than on flights. It also runs a growing advertising business, selling placements on its own high-traffic platform to airlines and hotel brands: consolidated advertising revenue was ₹80.2 crore in FY2024-25, of which roughly ₹81.8 crore (netted across segments) came from the air-ticketing side of the platform alone, versus ₹85.8 crore in FY2023-24.

The part of this model that most first-time customers misunderstand is the “no convenience fee” pitch: EaseMyTrip does not add the roughly ₹300-per-passenger booking fee that many airline websites and rival OTAs charge on domestic flights, and it has built its entire consumer brand around that absence. It can afford to give up that fee because the commissions and volume incentives it earns from airlines already cover the cost of the transaction — and because the model buys loyalty: co-founder Prashant Pitti has said the strategy has helped the company build an 86% repeat-transaction rate in its consumer business, a company-stated figure rather than an audited one. The trade-off is margin: flights are EaseMyTrip’s largest business by volume but its thinnest by percentage take, which is why the company has spent recent years pushing customers toward hotels and holiday packages instead.

The numbers

EaseMyTrip’s revenue from operations and profit after tax over the four most recent fiscal years, in ₹ crore, based on company results and market-data aggregators screener.in and stockanalysis.com:

Two things stand out. First, revenue has been essentially flat since FY2023-24 and then fell in FY2025-26, even though the value of bookings passing through the platform kept rising — Gross Booking Revenue grew from ₹8,512 crore in FY2024-25 to ₹8,691 crore the same year, a sign that the company is processing more travel spend for less revenue per booking. Second, profit margins compressed well before the loss showed up: EaseMyTrip’s own net profit margin fell from 29.9% in FY2022-23 to 17.5% in FY2023-24, and EBITDA margin then collapsed from 26.7% in FY2024-25 to about 4% in FY2025-26 as expenses rose roughly 39% year-on-year, according to the company’s FY2025-26 results.

Where the money comes from

By booking value, EaseMyTrip is still overwhelmingly a flight-booking company: flights accounted for 79.2% of Gross Booking Revenue in the June 2025 quarter (Q1 FY2025-26), with hotels and holiday packages at 18.8% and trains, buses and other bookings making up the remaining 2.1%, as reported by Outlook Business. The surprise sits one line down the income statement. By actual revenue from operations — the commission and fees the company keeps — flights fall to about 50%, hotels and holiday packages rise to 28.6%, and trains, buses and other services account for 21.4%. In other words, hotels and packages are a smaller slice of what EaseMyTrip sells but a disproportionately larger slice of what it earns, because the commission rate on a hotel room or a holiday package runs well above the commission rate on an airline seat. That gap is precisely why management has spent the past two years steering marketing and product effort toward hotels and packages, where bookings grew 81% year-on-year to 9.4 lakh in FY2024-25 from 5.2 lakh a year earlier, even while flights remain the volume anchor of the business.

The risks

The first risk is structural, not incidental: EaseMyTrip’s largest business by volume is also its lowest-margin one, and that business faces steady pressure from airlines pushing travellers toward their own direct-booking websites and apps, which need no intermediary commission at all. Every rupee EaseMyTrip spends trying to shift its mix toward higher-margin hotels and packages is a rupee spent fighting the gravity of its own booking mix.

The second risk is the promoters’ own behaviour with their stock. Nishant Pitti sold a 14% stake for about ₹920 crore in September 2024 at prices of ₹37.22-38.28 a share; by 31 December 2024 he sold a further roughly 1.4% stake for ₹78.32 crore, but this time at just ₹15.68 a share — a price roughly 59% lower than the September sale, in the space of about three months. Screener.in’s shareholding-pattern data shows promoter holding falling from 74.90% in March 2023 to 64.30% in March 2024, 48.97% in March 2025 and 43.56% by June 2026, and the same data shows Nishant Pitti pledging 34.51 crore shares to Motilal Oswal on 24 August 2026. None of this proves anything is wrong at the company, and Pitti has publicly said the sales reflect personal reasons rather than a loss of confidence, but a founder who keeps selling and pledging stock while telling shareholders not to worry is asking them to take that reassurance on faith rather than on the register.

The third risk is capital and management attention drifting away from the core OTA business at the exact moment its margins cracked. In 2024, Nishant Pitti led a consortium bidding to revive the grounded airline Go First, a bid he withdrew in May 2024 after regulators deregistered most of the airline’s aircraft. Since then the group has taken minority stakes in a German home-healthcare company and an Australian education business, and committed roughly ₹200 crore over two to three years to an electric-bus venture, Easy Green Mobility — all outside the company’s core travel-booking competency, and all announced in the same period that EaseMyTrip’s own EBITDA margin fell from 26.7% to about 4%.

The takeaway

The lesson in EaseMyTrip’s arc is not that bootstrapping is a virtue in itself, or that waiving a booking fee is a permanent moat. It is that a pricing promise built on thin commissions only holds up as long as volume keeps growing faster than costs — and that the same founder discipline which can build a profitable company for sixteen years without outside capital can just as easily turn into founder impatience once the stock is liquid: selling down a stake, pledging what remains and chasing unrelated ventures are all things a private, bootstrapped founder cannot do, and things a public one can do quietly, one block deal at a time.

Frequently asked questions

Did EaseMyTrip ever raise venture capital funding?

No. EaseMyTrip was bootstrapped from its founding in 2008 through its March 2021 listing, and its IPO was structured entirely as an offer for sale by promoters Nishant Pitti and Rikant Pitti, so even the listing itself brought no primary capital into the company.

Why doesn’t EaseMyTrip charge a convenience fee on flight bookings?

The company built its consumer brand around waiving the roughly ₹300-per-passenger fee that many rival platforms and airline websites charge, funding the gap through commissions and volume-linked incentives it earns from airlines rather than passing that cost to travellers.

Is EaseMyTrip profitable?

It was profitable every year from its founding through FY2024-25, including a net profit of ₹108.7 crore in FY2024-25, but it reported a net loss of ₹47.5 crore in FY2025-26 as revenue fell 8.8% and operating expenses rose sharply.

Why has EaseMyTrip’s share price fallen so much since its IPO?

A combination of large promoter stake sales since September 2024, a widely publicised share pledge by the chairman in August 2026, slowing revenue growth and the company’s move into a full-year loss in FY2025-26 has weighed on the stock, which now trades at a market capitalisation far below the roughly $1 billion peak it briefly touched in September 2021.

How big is EaseMyTrip compared with MakeMyTrip?

EaseMyTrip has been reported to hold roughly a 10% share of India’s online travel market as of 2025, well behind the MakeMyTrip group, which industry estimates put at around 60% share of the same online travel agency segment.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Wikipedia, “EaseMyTrip” — accessed September 2026
• Screener.in, Easy Trip Planners Ltd consolidated financials and shareholding pattern — accessed September 2026
• Stockanalysis.com, Easy Trip Planners (NSE:EASEMYTRIP) financials and market capitalisation — accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “EaseMyTrip revenue declines 15% in Q4 FY25” — February 2025
• Entrackr, “EaseMyTrip posts Rs 150 Cr revenue in Q3 FY25; profit declines” — January 2025
• Indian Startup News, “EaseMyTrip posts loss in FY26 after Rs 108 crore profit last year; revenue falls 9% to Rs 536 crore” — April 2026
• Free Press Journal, “EaseMyTrip Slips Into ₹15.4 Crore Q4 Loss, FY26 Ends with ₹47.5 Crore Loss as Expenses Jump 38.6%” — April 2026
• Storyboard18, “EaseMyTrip’s ad revenue dips 6% to Rs 80 crore in FY25, but strong holiday bookings drive growth” — 2025
• Outlook Business, “EaseMyTrip sees Q1 Growth Driven by Hotels, Packages, Robust Intel Ops” — August 2025
• Business Standard, “Promoter Nishant Pitti sells 14% stake in EaseMyTrip for Rs 920 cr” — September 2024
• Upstox, “EaseMyTrip’s Nishant Pitti clarifies 1.4% stake sale, affirms confidence in company’s future” — January 2025
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• Inc42, “With 1.5 Cr Shares On Offer, EaseMyTrip IPO Gets Bids For Over 240 Cr Equity Shares” — March 2021
• Business Standard, “EaseMyTrip IPO: Promoters look to offload 25% stake through share sale” — February 2021
• Skift, “How India’s EaseMyTrip Built a Brand Waiving Booking Fees” — January 2023
• Business Today, “GoAir crisis: EaseMyTrip’s Nishant Pitti withdraws bid for beleaguered airline” — May 2024
• Rajan Singh, “EaseMyTrip – Pitti Airlines’ Smooth Takeoff Hits Rough Skies”, Substack — 2025
• Tofler, “Success Story of EaseMyTrip: History, Business Model, Founders & More” — accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Higher Commission Helps EaseMyTrip Achieve 86% Profit Growth, Despite Decline In Revenue” — 2021
• Skift, “India-Maldives Spat: EaseMyTrip Halts Bookings, MakeMyTrip Launches New Campaign” — January 2024

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