Online travel aggregator ixigo swung to a consolidated net profit of Rs 63.4 crore in the second quarter ended September 2026, from a loss of Rs 3.5 crore a year earlier, largely driven by gains from the partial sale of its stake in intercity bus operator Freshbus.
In August this year, the company had said it would dilute its shareholding in Freshbus from 25.66% to 8.27%.
The transaction generated a gain of Rs 40.7 crore, which ixigo reported as an ‘exceptional item’ in its financial results.
Revenue from operations rose 13% year-on-year to Rs 321 crore but declined 10% sequentially from Rs 356.8 crore in Q1 FY27.
Why ixigo exited Freshbus
“ixigo is a technology and distribution platform, while Freshbus is an operating business – running fleets, crews and routes day to day is a fundamentally different company to build, with its own operating intensity and capital allocation rhythm. Parting ways made sense for both companies,” it said.
ixigo first invested in Freshbus in 2022, when intercity electric buses in India “were still an untested idea”.
The investment gave ixigo insight into the operational aspects of electric buses, including scheduling, charging, vehicle uptime and route economics. The company has taken those learnings to create a product that it can offer every EV operator.
Citing an industry report, ixigo said state transport corporations already run about 1,000 intercity e-buses, so this product has a market well beyond private operators.
ixigo reports Hotels as a separate business segment
For the first time, ixigo reported Hotels as a separate operating segment in Q2 FY27.
“We are now making detailed disclosures of our hotels business in line with how we disclose our other business lines because product-market fit is emerging and the business has become material,” it said.
ixigo saw more than 5,000 bookings a day across its hotel network during the quarter. Hotel GTV reached Rs 111 crore in Q2 FY27, up 39% quarter-on-quarter and 2.6x year-on-year. Revenue grew more than sixfold to Rs 8.1 crore. ixigo said its hotels business has a gross take rate of over 12%, “the highest of any of our businesses”.
More than 86% of hotel bookings come from captive users — those already using ixigo’s family of apps, which includes the flagship ixigo app, Confirmtkt and Abhibus. ixigo now has direct relationships with more than 12,000 hotels across approximately 1,100 towns. The company said it is adding several thousand properties every quarter through HELLO, its AI-powered hotel partner platform.
The company recently expanded its hotels business by acquiring a majority stake in Brevistay Hospitality.
So, where does the opportunity lie in the hotels segment? In its earnings release, ixigo said:
We believe we are well placed to serve the budget, mid-market and independent hotels of our country. This is where most hotel stays in India happen, where online booking is least developed and where the Peace of Mind problem is most acute. About 60% of hotel room nights in India sell below Rs 2,000 a night and independent hotels hold 73% of rooms.
This is mainly to fragmented, independent supply, which suggests online penetration at the budget end is lower still. Our users fit this profile. 94% of our transactions involve travellers traveling from or to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and more than 9 in 10 trips we sell are by train or bus, so a traveler looking for a budget room is often already booking a train or bus with us. That is where we see the most headroom.
As per a VIDEC industry report, India’s hotel market was Rs 1,57,100 crore in FY26 and is projected to grow to Rs 1,93,900 Cr by FY28, with lodging as a whole accounting for as much as 30% of the country’s total travel spend.
The portion booked through OTAs was about Rs 40,200 crore in FY26 and is projected to grow roughly 19% a year to about Rs 57,000 crore by FY28 — making hotels the second-largest OTA category in India, around three times the size of the OTA rail market. The actual TAM may be even bigger.
How is ixigo leveraging AI?
In an investor presentation, ixigo said that AI handled more than 43 lakh customer queries in Q2 FY27, more than double a year earlier. Its AI assistant TARA now resolves 94% of chat queries without human help and handles 82% of customer calls end-to-end.
The online travel platform is also building ixigo NEXT, a voice-first assistant on small language models developed in-house. Its apps already run as native apps inside ChatGPT.
ixigo has added fare trackers, price-prediction agents, and autonomous agents that deliver boarding passes to Apple and Google Wallets. As part of its AI-native app relaunch in May, the company added ‘agentic travel flows’, which allow AI systems to perform booking-related tasks in the background.
“Models are becoming commoditised. The advantage lies in proprietary context, workflows, memory, prediction and closing the loop between intelligence and execution,” ixigo said.
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