Booking.com Courts Indian SMEs With Self-Service Business-Travel Platform and In-House Payments

Speaking to Skift on 21 October, Booking.com’s South-Asia chief Santosh Kumar outlined a two-pronged assault on India’s lucrative corporate-travel sector. The OTA has quietly launched a free, self-service booking tool aimed at start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises, abandoning the traditional model of pre-negotiated corporate hotel rates. Instead, companies access the same public inventory but benefit from consolidated reporting, GST-compliant invoicing and loyalty credits. Concurrently, Booking.com is phasing out its popular ‘pay-at-hotel’ option for Indian users, opting to collect card payments itself and remit funds to accommodation partners daily, weekly or monthly. The move embeds the platform in the transaction flow, boosting cash-flow visibility and giving hotels faster settlement than the industry’s typical 30-day cycle. The competitive landscape is intense: MakeMyTrip’s myBiz product serves 79,000 active SMEs, Yatra’s Travel Pro is expanding tier-2 coverage, and Cleartrip’s Out-of-Office tool has won airline-backed subsidies. Booking.com hopes its global inventory and frictionless payments will resonate with Indian founders who routinely combine domestic and cross-border travel. For mobility managers the upside is choice: SMEs that lacked the volume to secure corporate rates can now obtain one-stop booking, policy controls and trip analytics without paying a subscription. Finance teams gain automatic GST capture, a pain-point when travellers book consumer sites. The downside is potential rate volatility because public-facing prices fluctuate more than contracted corporate allotments. Kumar downplayed geopolitical tensions in West Asia, saying outbound demand remains strong. Nevertheless, the firm is monitoring flight disruptions to Saudi Arabia and Israel, ready to push alternative routings through its platform if cancellations spike.