Domestic travel platform built around India's authenticity

An ex-Maruti, ex-Toyota automotive executive leaves the corporate world to build India's domestic travel platform — because India's most extraordinary destinations still aren't on the internet's map.

Domestic Travel · India Tourism · Travel Tech · Experiential

By Analog Ventures Research · March 2025 · 8 min read

India is one of the most visually, culturally, and historically complex countries on earth. It has ancient temples that have never been photographed for TripAdvisor. Himalayan trails that don't exist on Google Maps. Coastal villages where accommodation exists but has no booking system. And 1.4 billion people — an increasingly affluent, travel-hungry middle class — who mostly haven't seen any of it. BharatYaatri exists to fix this specific failure of imagination and infrastructure.

Manmeet Sawhney spent over a decade in the automotive industry — Maruti, Toyota — watching India's car ownership explosion and thinking about where people were driving those cars. The answer was mostly: the same places everyone else was driving. Goa, Shimla, Manali. The same five percent of India that the internet had indexed. The other ninety-five percent — Majuli Island, Ziro Valley, Mawsynram, the ghats of Varanasi by foot — existed in a booking-system vacuum. That's what he went to fix.

BharatYaatri is a domestic travel platform built around India's authentic destinations — the ones that are genuinely extraordinary but underrepresented in the mainstream travel booking ecosystem. Founded by Manmeet Sawhney, a former senior executive at Maruti Suzuki and Toyota India, the company brings a distribution mindset (how do you get the right product in front of the right consumer at the right time) to the travel sector.

The automotive background isn't incidental. Maruti's pan-India distribution network — reaching Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns that most consumer companies ignored — is a template for what BharatYaatri is trying to build in travel: discovery and booking infrastructure that works for the emerging middle-class traveller who is ready to explore beyond the stock-photo destinations, but whose journey begins and ends in cities like Patna, Bhopal, and Coimbatore.

The India Domestic Travel Gap

India's domestic tourism market is enormous — 1.7 billion domestic tourist visits annually, according to government data. Yet the digitization of this market is strikingly incomplete. Less than 20% of domestic hotel inventory is bookable online. Tour operator infrastructure outside major cities is mostly unorganised. Customer reviews for India's extraordinary regional destinations — Spiti Valley homestays, Chettinad heritage hotels, Sundarbans boat trips — barely exist on global platforms.

MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, and OYO have built considerable infrastructure for mainstream domestic travel — flights, chain hotels, standard city breaks. But the differentiated, experience-led, authentic India travel market is largely unserviced by these platforms. BharatYaatri's positioning is in this gap: curated domestic travel that goes beyond the standard itinerary to the India that most urban Indians have never seen.

1.7B Domestic Visits/yr

<20% Digitised Inventory

₹2.3L Cr Market Size Est.

Tier 2+ Destination Focus

The Founder's Automotive Distribution Lens

Sawhney's automotive background shapes BharatYaatri's product and distribution approach in specific ways. Car distribution in India is a masterclass in reaching markets that don't have ready-made infrastructure: Maruti sells cars in districts that don't have highways. The key is building a service layer (dealer network, service centres, financing) that makes the product viable in fragmented markets.

BharatYaatri's equivalent challenge is building the service layer around lesser-known destinations: vetted accommodation partnerships, ground transport solutions, certified guides, and the customer support infrastructure that makes a traveller willing to book a trip to Majuli Island rather than defaulting to Shimla. The automotive parallel is precise — you're not just selling a destination, you're selling the confidence that the end-to-end experience will work.

"India's best travel experiences aren't offline by choice. They're offline because nobody built the internet layer for them yet. That's not a discovery problem — it's an infrastructure problem."

Post-COVID India Travel: The Structural Shift

India's domestic travel market transformed permanently post-2020. The combination of international travel restrictions during COVID, growing environmental consciousness, the remote work-enabled flexibility to travel during non-peak periods, and a generational shift toward experience-over-stuff consumption has created a structural increase in domestic travel demand — particularly among the 25-40 demographic that has money to spend and wants experiences that generate social content.

This demographic is precisely BharatYaatri's target: the educated urban professional who has done the Goa trip three times and wants to discover something that isn't on their Instagram feed yet. They're willing to pay premium for curation and reliability — they just need someone to build the product.

Challenges in Domestic Travel Tech

• Supply aggregation complexity: Building booking relationships with hundreds of small, unorganised accommodation and tour providers across India is operationally intensive. Quality consistency is hard to maintain.

• Demand generation cost: Convincing travellers to book unfamiliar destinations requires significant content investment — photography, video, reviews, storytelling — that is expensive and slow to build.

• Seasonality: Many of India's extraordinary destinations are accessible only during specific seasons. Revenue concentration in peak periods creates cash flow challenges.

• Competition from funded platforms: If Airbnb, SOTC, or a well-funded startup decides to compete specifically in authentic India experiences, they bring distribution advantages that are hard to defend against without significant differentiation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What is BharatYaatri and how is it different from MakeMyTrip?

BharatYaatri focuses specifically on authentic, curated domestic India travel — destinations, experiences, and accommodations that are extraordinary but underrepresented in mainstream booking platforms. While MakeMyTrip optimises for mainstream hotels and flights at scale, BharatYaatri curates the India that most travellers haven't discovered yet: heritage stays, tribal cultural experiences, remote trekking circuits, coastal villages.

Q2: Who founded BharatYaatri?

BharatYaatri was founded by Manmeet Sawhney, a senior automotive industry executive with experience at Maruti Suzuki and Toyota India. The automotive background informs the company's distribution-first approach — building the service infrastructure that makes travel to lesser-known destinations reliable and bookable, similar to how car companies built distribution networks in markets without existing infrastructure.

Q3: What kind of travel does BharatYaatri specialise in?

Heritage and cultural tourism, experiential travel, nature and wildlife, adventure, and spiritual circuits — all within India. The emphasis is on destinations and experiences that have genuine depth but limited online presence: Assam's river islands, Karnataka's ancient temple corridors, Madhya Pradesh's tiger reserves, Rajasthan's lesser-known forts and villages.

The Verdict

BharatYaatri is attacking a real gap in India's travel ecosystem — the vast middle ground between "mass domestic booking" (MakeMyTrip's territory) and "unorganised local operators" (which has no digital interface). The founder's distribution expertise from automotive is a genuine edge in thinking about how to make this work at scale.

The challenge is supply-side aggregation and demand-side education — both take time and capital. But the macro tailwinds are undeniable: India's domestic tourism market is growing fast, the experience travel segment is growing faster, and the authentic-India gap in booking infrastructure is real. The company that builds the inventory and trust layer first will benefit from network effects that are hard to displace.

Watch for: Partnerships with state tourism boards to create exclusive packages, content-led discovery strategy through Instagram/YouTube that builds awareness for curated destinations, and B2B corporate travel packages for companies running offsite experiences.

Sources & References

BharatYaatri official website · India Ministry of Tourism annual report · Domestic tourism market research · India travel industry reports · Primary research, March 2025.

This article is an independent editorial analysis. Analog Ventures Research has no commercial relationship with BharatYaatri.

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