Battered through the coronavirus pandemic that crashed its sales to zero, India’s biggest online tour booking organization MakeMyTrip became forced to let go of 350 people, that is nearly 10 percentage of its staff, in June.

Initially, around March-end whilst the united states of america entered into the primary section of the lockdown, the organization had hoped it’d not need to fire any of its personnel, having affected pay cuts throughout the board.

“But then, two months into the pandemic we realised this is going to take longer and we had to take a very tough decision. I think it’s fair to say the toughest decision we have ever taken, which was a large scale retrenchment — almost 10 percent of our staff, which was 350 people — we had to ask to go,” MakeMyTrip Founder Deep Kalra said in an interview.

The layoffs have been from businesses which the organization thought might not come again in a long term or at least would not be completed the identical way. These were generally the retail corporations, which the Nasdaq-listed Gurugram organization is withinside the process of changing into franchises and hopes people will nevertheless have gainful employment in these functions whilst the stores come back in their new avatars.

“I think for us, the way we are wired — we are Indian, we don’t have that hire-fire mentality — at least, we certainly don’t. Asking one person to go for (a) reason (that’s) not his or her fault is hard and when you do it mass-scale, it’s very hard,” Deep said.

In March, the World Travel and Tourism Council had warned that fifty million jobs withinside the travel and tourism enterprise will be lost worldwide because of the coronavirus pandemic. It projected Asia as being the worst affected with the opportunity of 30 million job losses withinside the continent.

“It’s the right thing to do. So we did extend the benefits and perks, whether it was medical insurance till a whole year, we did let them keep the laptops [sic]. For people who had done long service, we did even more, like linked to how long they had served us.”

“And then, even on a personal front, both Rajesh and I wanted to help anyone who had done a long time with us, more than 10 years, which we did. But it’s the worst thing to do and hopefully we never ever have to do that again,” he said.

He contemplated on the irony that twenty years after the travel company was launched on April 1, 2000, it discovered itself in a role where on its anniversary there has been virtually no travel happening, with everybody locked down inside their homes.

“Our entire leadership team, I think it was creditable (that) they took a 50 percent cut and they continue to do so. And even though travel is coming back and now we have started restoring, it’s been (a) good four-five months of being like that,” Deep said.

MakeMyTrip commenced restoring salaries of personnel until the senior supervisor level by July end, as soon as the business started to come again. “Some of our lines of business have definitely started like domestic flights, I think we are back now at 15-20 percent capacity, which is a start,” Deep said. For hotel bookings, demand is at 10-12 percent of the capacity, as is the call for for bus and different inter-city travel modes, he added.