MakeMyTrip launches AI-enabled travel agent Myra

Online travel booking platform MakeMyTrip has introduced an AI-powered virtual travel agent that can guide users through every step of their journey on the website, from trip planning and booking to handling post-sales queries such as cancellations and refunds, via both voice and text.

Users can ask complex and open-ended queries in the realm of travel in Hindi or English like “Where can I go in August for a relaxing holiday with my kids?,” or “I want to go to south India to cover Madurai, Rameswaram, Kovalam, Kodaikanal. Can you suggest me the best route? But I don’t want to travel via flight”.

The virtual assistant Myra is built on a network of specialised AI agents across all major travel categories, flights, accommodation, holidays, ground transport, visas, and forex. It supports multimodal input (text, voice, image, video), continuous back-and-forth dialogue, itinerary edits, and post-sales support — all within the same interface.

Myra will gives user personalised answers based on up-to-date availability, prices, and relevance. MakeMyTrip claims that while most AI travel tools only offer suggestions to users, this tool goes a step further by helping users move from travel ideas to actually helping travellers book their travel and complete payment online – something that hasn’t been tried before. It will offer assistance not just with flights and hotels but also holiday planning, ground transport such as cabs and buses, visas and forex.

CEO Rajesh Magow said such digital innovations helped “reach the deepest corners, and bringing seamless, intelligent travel booking to those who have long been underserved by digital platforms.”

“MakeMyTrip has seen travel demand penetration grow deeper over the years, from metro to top 15 cities many years ago to now as many as 2,000 unique cities,” he told The Hindu. The portal commands more than 50% market share among all online travel booking portals.

Myra may be able to facilitate bookings for an individual but it lacks the complexities of negotiating, handling customer bargains, accounting for individual preferences for a group bookings like a human travel agent, or helping during a travel emergency.

“Even if AI is able to do 50% of a human tour manager’s work, there will still be room for workforce in other tasks and AI related human intervention,” he added.

The tool is currently available in Hindi and English and will be expanded to include other regional languages too. It is currently available in beta version which will be released to a limited group of real users for testing before the official launch.

Group Chief Technology Officer Sanjay Mohan called the product “the most ambitious build” undertaken by the company.

In the next stage, MakeMyTrip will add smarter search tools that can understand the meaning behind what you’re looking for, even from images and videos. This means one won’t have to rely only on fixed filters and can search in a more intuitive manner. The system will be able to pick up on subtle travel needs, making it easier and more personal to find what you want.