NEW DELHI: Online travel firm MakeMyTrip on Thursday said it plans to increase its all-women team of 'holiday experts' boosted by consistent growth delivered and highest-ever packages sold by them last fiscal.
In FY22, the team of women freelancers, serving as holiday experts, helped curate packages for nearly two lakh travellers closing the year with highest-ever packages sold by these experts in over 10 years, MakeMyTrip said in a statement.
"Spurred by the consistent growth, in the coming months, MakeMyTrip is now aiming to expand the franchise network and increase its pool of holiday experts across the country," it added.
The company, however, did not elaborate by how much the number of its all-women team of holiday experts would be increased.
Currently, MakeMyTrip said it has over 850 women holiday experts with 43 per cent of them being mothers and caregivers working from metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Indore, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Lucknow.
MakeMyTrip said during the pandemic it saw a 200 per cent increase in interest from women freelancers in joining this team from these markets.
"We take pride in our robust holiday expert program that includes women from all walks of life.
It's a platform that offers flexible work engagements, attractive conversion-based remuneration, and numerous opportunities for holistic growth," MakeMyTrip Business Head, Holidays & Experiences, Jasmeet Singh said The company was amongst the initial set of companies who realised the power of working from home, and started investing in a team of freelancers, he added.
"Our efforts to build a strong base of end-to-end holiday planning experts have been consistently delivering dividends in the form of rising contributions to the Holiday Packages segment.
We are now keen on expanding our base of over 850 holiday experts and our franchise networks, as we target to penetrate deeper in this segment," Singh said.
The company said it offers benefits, including self and family insurance cover, access to upskilling and development courses, team bonding and engagement opportunities and travel perks to its holiday experts.
"Their trust in us as a brand bolstered during the pandemic as we remained committed to our promise of taking care of the team.
During this period, we continued to remain invested in the team and leveraged their expertise for building cause-related and pandemic-focused assets, beyond travel packages," Singh said.
The all-women holiday expert team is proficient in addressing holiday booking queries in different languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada and Telugu, besides English, the company said.