If you’re new here, Eximius is a pre-seed VC fund backing bold ideas across Consumer AI, FinAI, and Enterprise AI.
This week on Eximius Echo, we’re looking at what happens when AI starts planning travel around the traveller.
You tell an AI you want five days away with your partner, somewhere warm, under ₹2 lakh, with great food, minimal transit, and enough time actually to relax.
It already knows you prefer boutique hotels to resorts, hate red-eye flights, avoid packed itineraries, and spent your last holiday wishing you had booked fewer activities.
So it does the work: narrows the destination, builds the itinerary, compares stays, factors in crowds and travel time, books what you approve, and replans when it rains.
That is where travel is heading.
Today, travel remains one of the internet’s most fragmented consumer journeys. Discovery happens across Instagram, Google, YouTube and recommendations from friends and family. Flights, hotels and activities sit across different platforms. Planning means comparing dozens of variables, while support often disappears once the booking is complete.
AI changes the interface from search to intent. In that world, the advantage shifts from having the largest catalogue to making the best decision for a specific traveller.
HOW THE MARKET IS RESPONDING
The first model is emerging from incumbents that already own distribution, inventory and transaction volume.
Booking.com has expanded AI across trip planning, natural-language property search, review summaries and property Q&A. Expedia is pushing further across planning, comparison, booking, service and in-trip assistance, including tools that compare properties around variables like vibe, location and trade-offs.
In India, MakeMyTrip’s Myra takes users from conversational discovery to transaction-ready options across flights, hotels and ancillary services. It handles over 50,000 conversations daily across eight languages, with more than 45% of queries coming from Tier-2 and smaller cities. Ixigo, meanwhile, now offers an AI trip planner alongside its existing flight, train, bus and hotel marketplace.
The incumbent playbook is taking shape: use AI to make existing supply easier to discover, compare and transact.
Newer players can start somewhere else.
Rather than adding AI to a large catalogue, AI-native and niche platforms can build around a specific traveller, trip type or workflow from day one. That opens several models:
THE REAL UNLOCK IS CONTEXT
Adoption is already visible: 33% of Indians use AI for trip planning.
But generating a neat itinerary is only the starting point.
A product that remembers who you travel with, your preferred pace, budget, food choices, hotel style, loyalty memberships and previous trips can make increasingly better decisions each time.
That opportunity becomes especially interesting in India. While international trips account for far higher spend, 99% of trips taken by Indians remain domestic. At the same time, 92% of Indian travellers belong to at least one loyalty programme, with 37% using those benefits for leisure travel.
Trust remains the constraint. Holidays are expensive, infrequent and emotionally loaded. A bad recommendation can cost money, time and a meaningful chunk of annual leave.
ONE MODEL WE’RE SEEING UP CLOSE
30 Sundays, which we first backed at pre-seed, is taking the AI-native concierge route.
Its philosophy is simple: “Learn First, Book Second.”
Customers get personalised, video-first itineraries that surface crowds, queues, travel time, food options and the actual pace of a day. Travellers can modify itineraries through voice, while an AI-plus-human model supports planning, booking and on-trip assistance. AI also powers lead qualification, itinerary creation, follow-ups and reservations.
Monthly Gross Booking Value (GBV) has grown from ₹1 Cr in May 2025 to ~₹16 Cr by June 2026, and the company recently raised ₹61 Cr in a Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with continued participation from Info Edge Ventures and Eximius.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The market is converging on the same idea from different directions.
Incumbents are making massive travel marketplaces more intelligent. AI-native players are rebuilding narrower journeys around context from the ground up.
The next battle in travel will come down to who understands the traveller best, and who can turn that understanding into action.
If you’re building at the intersection of Consumer AI, travel, or agentic experiences, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at pitches@eximiusvc.com.
