Travel service providers continue to lay off employees despite a gradual resumption of domestic flights and a phased reopening in some states in the absence of any clear signs of a recovery, particularly in segments like international travel.
Thomas Cook has laid off about 1,000 people so far while travel portal Yatra, post the termination of its pending merger agreement with Ebix earlier this month, has laid off about 400 people besides putting 600 employees on leave without pay, people familiar with the developments said.
“We know of people who are not getting salaries in Yatra,” one of them said. “Companies realise that they may not need as many people going forward this year.”
Both Thomas Cook and Yatra did not respond to emails seeking comments till the time of going to press on Monday.
Travel portal MakeMyTrip laid off at least 350 employees as of June first week as per reports.
“After having analysed the impact of the pandemic on the business closely and spending considerable time assessing the path to business recovery – it became clear that certain lines of business are far deeply impacted and will take much longer than others to recover, like international holidays,” a company spokesperson said in response to ET’s queries. “The number of employees impacted as a result of the rightsizing exercise stands at 350 plus,” the person said.
People familiar with the matter said the number of people whose work arrangements with the Gurgaon-based travel services firm have been impacted would be far higher if one were to also take into account contractual and outsourced staff servicing the company.
In a letter to its employees, MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra had said it was unclear when the travel industry will come back to normalcy.
ET had reported in May that Thomas Cook and SOTC had sacked close to 350 employees with more job cuts likely at the two associate companies.
As per some reports, India will consider creating travel bubbles from next month with countries that allow access to its citizens and vice versa through bilateral arrangements, but most players in the sector do not foresee a recovery in international travel this year.
“Companies realise that they may not need a lot of staff support in their call centres,” said a person familiar with the developments. “People will not travel so much for leisure till next year.”
Earlier this month, Yatra said it has filed a litigation against Ebix Inc in Chancery, Delaware over the company’s breaches of the merger agreement. Ebix had announced in July last year that it was acquiring the Indian online travel service provider for an enterprise value of $337.8 million.
Leave a Reply