Top 10 Travel Agencies in India

The top 10 travel agencies in India are not competing for the same booking, and that is the first thing worth sorting out. An online platform selling a Delhi to Mumbai flight, an escorted tour operator running a 12-day Europe departure, and a resort membership sold for the next 25 years are 3 different products. Ranking them against each other produces a list, not an answer.

So this guide splits them by what they actually do. 10 companies make the list, 6 of them online travel platforms you work yourself and 4 of them guided tour operators you hand a trip to, with SOTC profiled under its parent because the escorted-tour catalogue is genuinely its own. A famous eleventh name turns out to sell a vacation membership rather than travel, and it gets a section of its own for that reason. For each company this names the legal owner, what it is genuinely good at, and the fees you do not get back.

I checked ownership, current operations, published fee schedules and cancellation terms for every company here on August 29, 2026. What follows is a comparison by category, owner and terms, and it deliberately does not crown a cheapest or a friendliest, because nobody can honestly claim either without running controlled price and support tests.

Travel Agencies in India at a Glance

11 rows for 10 companies. SOTC has its own row because its escorted-tour product differs from its parent’s, not because it is a separate business.

Company	Type	Owner	Best for	Platform fee on cancellation
MakeMyTrip	Online platform	MakeMyTrip Limited	Widest product range	Convenience and service fees
ixigo	Online platform	Le Travenues Technology	Trains and buses	Service and convenience fees
Yatra	Online platform	Yatra Online	Corporate and SME travel	Convenience fee, plus its own cancellation charge
EaseMyTrip	Online platform	Easy Trip Planners	Low-fee domestic flights	Convenience fee returns if you cancel
Cleartrip	Online platform	Flipkart, majority-owned by Walmart	Knowing the fee before booking	Convenience fee, and stated rupee charges
Expedia	Global platform	Expedia Group	International hotels and rentals	Varies by supplier and entity
Thomas Cook India	Tour operator	Thomas Cook (India) Limited	Visas, forex and packaged trips	Set per quote, not published
SOTC	Tour operator	Thomas Cook (India) Limited	Escorted international tours	Set per quote, not published
Kesari Tours	Tour operator	Kesari Tours	Senior, women-only and spiritual groups	Set per quote, not published
Veena World	Tour operator	Veena World	Escorted tours from western India	Set per quote, not published
Cox and Kings	Tour operator	Wilson and Hughes India	Escorted and private journeys	Set per quote, not published

Read the owner column first. It is the fastest way to catch the moment 2 names on your shortlist turn out to be 1 company.

Who Owns Which Travel Brand

Indian travel has consolidated harder than its logos suggest. 15 consumer brands that a traveler would name as separate options resolve to 10 owning entities, and 3 of those owners hold more than 1 brand each.

This matters at the moment you compare quotes. Asking MakeMyTrip and Goibibo for the same package, or SOTC and Thomas Cook India for the same itinerary, feels like 2 opinions and is 1, and it also means 1 grievance address if something goes wrong on either.

Check the owner, then build the shortlist.

Best Online Travel Agencies in India

These 6 platforms sell you the components and leave the assembly to you. They are cheapest to use when the trip is simple, and they are where the fee arithmetic in the next section applies.

MakeMyTrip

MakeMyTrip is the largest travel platform in India by money booked, and the gap is not close. For the quarter ended June 30, 2026 the group reported roughly $2.9 billion in gross bookings, up 19.9% year over year in constant currency, on revenue of $285.6 million. The same platform sells flights, hotels, villas and homestays, holiday packages, trains, buses, cabs, tours, visas, cruises, forex cards and travel insurance.

Goibibo and redBus belong to it as well, and that matters more than it sounds. Both are MakeMyTrip Limited applications running through the same corporate compliance address, so shortlisting MakeMyTrip and Goibibo as rivals gives 1 company 2 slots.

Best for: the widest product range under one login, and packages where flights, hotels and transfers are bought together.

The limit: its user agreement makes the convenience fee non-refundable, and states that the MakeMyTrip service fee, payment gateway charges and free-cancellation charges are non-refundable too and may be deducted from what comes back to you. On a cheap domestic ticket, that stack can be a meaningful share of the fare.

ixigo

ixigo is the one platform on this list that starts with the train. It is run by Le Travenues Technology, a listed company, and it reports 544 million annual active users for FY25, which is a traffic figure rather than a customer count and should be read that way. Trains come first, then buses, flights and hotels.

For a country where most long-distance travel still happens on rails, that ordering is the product decision that matters. Waitlist prediction, PNR tracking and running status are the daily-use features here, not a hotel carousel.

Best for: trains and buses, and for travelers who want one app that treats rail as the main event rather than an afterthought.

The limit: its terms are blunt about fees, stating in capitals that any fee charged by ixigo, including the ixigo service fee and convenience fee paid at booking, is a non-refundable fee. The same wording is repeated for trains and buses. Hotel inventory is also thinner than what MakeMyTrip or Expedia will show you.

Yatra

Yatra is the corporate travel specialist that also sells to the public. For the quarter ended June 30, 2026 it reported gross bookings of Rs 21,006.8 million, up 16.3% year over year, revenue from operations of Rs 1,879.0 million, and a profit of Rs 40.9 million. It serves more than 1,340 large corporate customers and about 60,750 registered small and medium business customers, and describes itself as India’s largest corporate travel services provider by number of corporate clients.

That is a real, checkable distinction, and it is more useful than a vague claim about being good for international trips. If your travel is booked by an admin team against a policy, this is the platform built for that job.

Travelguru belongs to Yatra as well, and the Travelguru domain now sends visitors straight to yatra.com. There is no separate Travelguru booking service left to choose. One brand now.

Best for: company travel with approval workflows, expense capture and negotiated fares, plus ordinary consumer booking alongside it.

The limit: Yatra applies its own cancellation charge on top of whatever the airline deducts, and the convenience fee taken at booking is not returned. Consumer revenue also fell 10.4% year over year in that quarter even as bookings grew, which is a business shifting its weight toward corporate.

EaseMyTrip

EaseMyTrip built its name on not charging a convenience fee, and it has scale behind it. Established in 2008, it reports more than 33 million registered users, over 21 million Android downloads, 77,500 travel agents, more than 1,700 employees and 13 franchise stores. It is listed, and it is still run by its founding family.

The no-fee positioning is the reason most people try it, so it is worth reading the actual offer rather than the banner.

Best for: price-sensitive domestic flight booking, especially if you are comparing several platforms anyway and will apply the code.

The limit: the waiver is a coupon. Its own terms require promo code EMTNCF at checkout, say the offer cannot be combined with any other running offer, and state that in case of partial or full cancellation the convenience fee per passenger per sector will be applied. A fee you avoid at booking and pay at cancellation is a deferred fee, not an absent one.

Cleartrip

Cleartrip is owned by Flipkart, which bought 100% of it in 2021 and which is itself majority-owned by Walmart. It sells flights, hotels and buses, and it keeps a deliberately plainer interface than the offer-heavy competition.

Its best quality is unglamorous and genuinely rare. Cleartrip publishes its own charges as exact rupee amounts instead of hiding them behind a phrase like applicable fees.

The published flight policy lists Rs 300 per passenger per sector for an online domestic cancellation and Rs 500 offline, Rs 649 per passenger for an online international cancellation, and Rs 300 per passenger per segment to amend a domestic booking. It also says the convenience fee is not refunded when you cancel, or when the airline cancels the flight. You can price a mistake before you make it, which almost no competitor lets you do. Rare, and useful.

Best for: readers who want to know the cancellation cost before booking rather than after.

The limit: disclosure is not the same as cheapness. Every one of those amounts sits on top of the airline’s own penalty, and the product range stops well short of MakeMyTrip’s.

Expedia

Expedia belongs on an Indian shortlist for one job: international inventory. Expedia Group runs Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, ebookers, CheapTickets, Wotif and trivago from Seattle, and that portfolio reaches into overseas cities and property types where Indian platforms thin out fast.

Vacation rentals are the clearest case. An 8-night family apartment in Lisbon is a normal Vrbo search and an awkward one on a domestic OTA.

Best for: international hotels, apartments and multi-country stays, particularly outside the usual Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok corridors.

The limit: it is a global company, not an Indian agency, so check 3 things before paying. Confirm whether your contract is with Expedia, another group entity or the hotel directly, confirm the price is charged in rupees rather than converted by your card, and confirm you can get a GST invoice if you need one. Support routed offshore is also a different experience from a domestic call center.

Best Guided Tour Operators in India

A tour operator sells a finished trip, which is a different purchase from a discounted ticket. You are paying for someone to sequence hotels, transfers, guides, entry tickets and a visa file, and to be reachable when a connection is missed in a country where you do not speak the language.

Judge them on the quote, not the brochure. A comparable quote states the named hotels, the room occupancy, what is excluded, the cancellation ladder and the minimum group size, and any operator that will not put those in writing has told you something.

Thomas Cook India

Thomas Cook India is the broadest travel services company in this comparison, and it is not primarily a booking website. Alongside holidays, flights and hotels it sells foreign exchange, remittances, visa assistance, travel insurance and corporate MICE travel, and it carries the line Trusted Since 1881 with company-reported figures of 4,000-plus tours and more than 1 million travelers.

The ownership is worth knowing because it explains the group’s reach. Thomas Cook (India) Limited is listed in India, and its promoter is Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius), a subsidiary of the Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings, which holds about 63.83% of the paid-up capital after acquiring its original stake in 2013. Sterling Holidays and SOTC sit under the same roof.

Best for: trips where the paperwork is the hard part, meaning visas, forex, insurance and a complicated itinerary handled by one desk.

The limit: foreign exchange is no longer the differentiator it once was, since MakeMyTrip now sells forex cards and currency on the same page as its flights. Breadth also has a cost, so compare the forex rate and the visa service charge separately rather than assuming a bundled package is priced well throughout.

SOTC

SOTC is a Thomas Cook India company, not a competitor to it. Its own site describes SOTC Travel Limited as a step-down subsidiary of the Fairfax Financial Holdings group, held through Thomas Cook (India) Limited, and the brand traces back to 1949.

What it actually sells is escorted group tours, customized and luxury holidays, honeymoon packages, incentive and MICE travel, cruises, rail tours and travel insurance. There is real product depth in the escorted-tour catalogue, and the group-departure calendar is one of the fuller ones in India.

Best for: first-time international travelers who want a fixed departure, a tour manager and a fully priced itinerary rather than a set of separate bookings.

The limit: if you ask SOTC and Thomas Cook India for competing quotes, you have asked one group twice. Get your second quote from Kesari, Veena World or an independent operator instead, or you are negotiating against yourself.

Kesari Tours

Kesari is the specialist in taking specific kinds of people on specific kinds of trips. Its company-reported numbers are 42 years of operation, more than 1 million guests, over 200,000 completed tours and more than 400 tour leaders, and the catalogue is organized around who you are traveling with rather than only where you are going.

The specialty lines are the reason to call them. My Fair Lady runs women-only departures, Marigold covers spiritual journeys, and there are separate programs for senior citizens, students and honeymooners, plus tailormade holidays, corporate MICE and cruises with visa, forex and insurance handled alongside.

A clause in its terms deserves a careful read before you pay, because it changes what you are buying. Kesari states that a tour proceeds only if more than 20 guests have booked and those bookings arrive at least 30 days before departure. Below that, the company may merge your tour with another, or run it without a Kesari tour leader on a small vehicle or mini coach and on a modified meal plan, or cancel with at least 15 days’ notice, refunding what you paid after deducting taxes and any visa fees already sent to a consulate.

Best for: group departures where the company you keep matters, particularly senior, women-only and spiritual itineraries.

The limit: the departure you book is not guaranteed to be the departure you take. Ask for the current booking count on your specific date before paying, and ask what happens to your visa fee if the tour is called off.

Veena World

Veena World is the youngest company in this section and the one closest to a family business at scale. It is run by the Patil family, with Veena Patil as founder and chief executive, Sunila Patil as chief product officer, Sudhir Patil as chairperson and Neil Patil as chief technology and operating officer, and its site reports 980,029 guests, 77,316 completed tours, more than 325 tour experts and over 150 branches and sales partners.

The product range now runs across domestic regions, every inhabited continent, and a long specialty list covering women’s tours, seniors’ tours, family departures, honeymoons, road trips and short breaks, alongside customized holidays, corporate travel, NRI tours and forex.

Best for: escorted tours out of Maharashtra and western India especially, where its branch and sales-partner network is densest.

The limit: it is roughly a decade old, against 42 years at Kesari and a group history at Thomas Cook that predates independence. Every scale figure above is its own count, published on its own site, with no independent audit behind it.

Cox and Kings

Cox and Kings is the most misunderstood name in Indian travel, because the brand and the company are not the same thing. The name dates to 1758. The business you would be paying today was bought out of insolvency in 2024 by Wilson and Hughes India through a court-supervised process at the National Company Law Tribunal, and it resumed trading in 2025.

The new owner is candid about the break. Its own pages describe Wilson and Hughes as a conglomerate with over $500 million in annual revenue across cement, FMCG, mining, construction and logistics, call travel its first venture, and state plainly that the current entity carries none of the previous management’s liabilities. It reports having served more than 10,000 travelers since reopening, with escorted group tours and tailor-made journeys across more than 100 destinations on 7 continents.

So the heritage is real and the operating record is about a year old. Both facts are true at once, and the second one is the one that affects your trip.

Best for: escorted and private journeys, if you are comfortable being an early customer of a rebuilt operation with a well-funded parent behind it.

The limit: reviews written before 2024 describe a company that no longer exists, so they tell you nothing about the service you would receive. Ask for references from tours operated in the last 12 months, and read the payment and cancellation terms as you would for any new operator.

Club Mahindra Sells a Membership, Not a Trip

Club Mahindra appears on most Indian travel agency lists, and it does not belong on one. Run by the listed company Mahindra Holidays and Resorts, its Keystone program sells a multi-year membership giving 7 nights and 8 days of holidays each year, at more than 140 Club Mahindra resorts in India and, through partners, at over 5,000 resorts across more than 110 countries. It reports a member community above 300,000 and 30 years of operation.

The tiers are availability tiers, and they are where the real difference sits. EBONY opens 52 weeks of the year, IVORY 46 and JADE 24, so the cheaper key is the one that cannot be used in the weeks you most want to travel.

None of that makes it a bad product. It makes it a different product, bought against a different question.

An OTA answers where am I going next month. A membership answers where is this family going every year for the next couple of decades, and it should be priced against 20 years of booking those resorts directly, not against one weekend in Goa.

The Fees That Never Come Back

The most useful thing to know about Indian travel platforms is not which is cheapest. It is that the part of your money the platform keeps for itself is usually the part that does not come back.

Every one of these terms is published by the company on its own site.

Platform	Charges on top of the supplier	What the terms say
MakeMyTrip	Convenience fee, service fee, payment gateway charges	Its user agreement makes the convenience fee non-refundable, and lists the service fee, payment gateway charges and free-cancellation charges as non-refundable and deductible from your refund.
ixigo	Service fee and convenience fee	States in capitals that any fee charged by ixigo at the time of booking is a non-refundable fee, and repeats it for trains and buses.
Yatra	Convenience fee, plus a Yatra cancellation charge	Applies its own cancellation charge on top of the airline’s penalty, and does not return the convenience fee.
Cleartrip	Convenience fee, plus stated cancellation and amendment charges	Rs 300 per passenger per sector online domestic, Rs 500 offline, Rs 649 online international, Rs 300 to amend a domestic booking. The convenience fee is not refunded even when the airline cancels.
EaseMyTrip	Convenience fee, waived only with a code	Promo code EMTNCF is required, the offer cannot be combined with any other, and the fee per passenger per sector is applied if you cancel.
Expedia	Depends on the supplier and the contracting entity	Read the specific rate rules on the booking, since terms differ by property, airline and Expedia Group entity.

So a saving at booking can reverse completely after 1 date change. Compare platforms on what you would lose if the trip did not happen, not only on what you pay if it does. Different number entirely.

Cleartrip deserves credit here for an unglamorous reason. It publishes exact rupee amounts where most competitors write applicable charges, which lets you price the risk before you take it.

Book Direct or Through a Platform

There is no universal rule, and anyone quoting a flat percentage that platforms add is guessing. What sits between the supplier’s price and the platform’s total is a mix of convenience fees, service fees, payment gateway charges, preselected add-ons, coupon terms, card restrictions and sometimes a genuinely different supplier rate, and it moves by route, by date and by payment method.

The fourth question is the one people skip and later regret. A platform booking puts a second desk between you and the airline, which helps when that desk is competent and hurts when it becomes one more handoff at 2am.

For domestic rail specifically, a comparison app is often better than either route, and the best train running status apps in India covers the tools worth keeping on your phone.

How to Check a Travel Agency Before You Pay

Most travel disputes in India are not about a bad holiday. They are about money that went somewhere and did not come back, and 6 checks before payment prevent most of them.

• Match the beneficiary to the company. The name on the UPI or bank transfer should be the legal entity named on the invoice. A payment to an individual’s personal account is the single clearest warning sign there is.
• Ask for a GST invoice before paying, not after. A company that will issue one has a registration you can check, and you will need it for any corporate reimbursement.
• Read both cancellation ladders. The supplier has one and the agency has another, and they stack. Ask specifically which fees survive a cancellation.
• Get the minimum group size in writing. On a group tour, ask how many are booked on your date today and what happens if the number falls, including whether your visa fee is refundable.
• Note the grievance officer. Indian consumer rules require a named contact for complaints. Save it before you need it, not while you are arguing.
• Check the registration, and weigh it correctly. The Ministry of Tourism’s NIDHI directory lists registered travel businesses, including 924 online travel aggregators. Registration proves a company filed paperwork, not that it serves customers well.

If a refund stalls anyway, the escalation order is fixed and it works better than repeated calls to a helpline.

1. Company support first, in writing, with a complaint reference number.
2. The company’s grievance or nodal officer, quoting that reference.
3. AirSewa, the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s grievance portal, for anything involving a flight or an airport.
4. The National Consumer Helpline, on 1915, on WhatsApp at +91 8800001915, or at consumerhelpline.gov.in.
5. The District, State or National Consumer Commission if it is still unresolved.

Written records at each step are what make the later ones work.

Where These Lists Usually Go Wrong

The same 4 mistakes show up in nearly every Indian travel agency ranking, and each one costs the reader something specific. They double-count owned brands, so a group with 3 apps takes 3 slots and looks like 3 choices. They rank a vacation membership alongside a flight booking, which compares a 25-year commitment against a Tuesday. They treat a founding date as an operating record, so a name from 1758 outranks a company that has actually been running tours for 40 years. And they quote a tidy percentage that platforms supposedly add, when the real gap is an unpredictable stack of fees that changes with the route, the date and the card you use.

The fix for all 4 is the same. Rank the company, not the logo, and check the terms rather than the tagline.

What This Guide Does Not Claim

Everything above is verifiable from company filings, published terms and live company pages. What is missing comes down to 3 claims, and making them anyway would be the same failure this page exists to avoid.

• No cheapest. Establishing that would need the same routes and dates priced across every platform, repeatedly, and read at the final payable screen rather than the search result. That is not done here, so no platform is called cheapest.
• No best customer service. Support quality varies by channel, hour and agent, and a fair verdict needs a documented sample across phone, email and chat. Words like patchy and excellent are opinions dressed as findings unless that sample exists.
• No refund performance. The tables above report what each company’s published terms say, which is not the same as what actually lands in a bank account or how long it takes. Policy and practice can differ, and only a real cancellation shows the gap.

Every audience and scale number quoted here is company-reported and labeled as such, including registered users, app downloads, guest counts and tour totals. Financial figures come from the companies’ own quarterly filings.

If you want destination reading rather than booking mechanics, the best travel bloggers in India is a better starting point, and the Kushinagar travel guide is an example of the kind of local detail no platform surfaces.

FAQs on Travel Agencies in India

Final Remarks

The question is not which travel agency in India is best. It is which of 3 jobs you are actually buying: components you assemble yourself, a finished trip somebody else assembles, or years of future holidays bought in advance.

Get that right and the shortlist writes itself. A weekend in Goa needs a platform and 10 minutes. A first trip to Europe with parents needs an operator and a written quote. A family that returns to the same 3 resorts every year is having a different conversation entirely.

Then check the owner, so 2 logos from 1 company do not become 2 options. Then read what happens if you cancel, because that is where the difference between platforms is real and measurable, and where the cheapest booking often stops being the cheapest one.

Travel professionals reading this from the other side of the counter may find travel agency lead generation more useful than the comparison above.