Holiday Expert Town Hall Meet 2013: The Grand Red and Black Ceremony

Lights, camera, action! The stage was set and all the glamorous ladies, our very own Holiday Expert (HE) Team, convened at Epicentre, Gurgaon to kick-off the first ever MakeMyTrip HE Town Hall Meet.

Glitz and Glamour

Dressed in enigmatic shades of red and black, the ladies graced their presence on stage and posed for photos, Oscar style.

Ladies dressed to 'wow' in red and blackAs the cameras flashed and the auditorium filled with MMT buzz, Milena built the excitement by sharing details about the company and success of the HE channel, a grand initiative taken in December 2011.

Milena's one-liners kept the audience enthralled Creating History in 18 Months

As an ode to all HE achievers, the evening started with a beautiful AV on ‘women’, with few pictures of inspiring MMT ladies, followed by a snapshot of the amazing HE journey. The statistics were indeed unbelievable, and reflected the tremendous effort put in collectively by the team.

With the audience high on energy and enthusiasm, Mohit Gupta kept the momentum going with an engaging talk on the paradigm shift to HE channel and how this value addition goes a long way in making customers happy.

Happy Trippers - Mohit Gupta, Manish Kalra, Sanket Atal and Sushil Verma

A Bite of the Success Pie

After his invigorating speech, it was time for the highlight of the THM – the Big Awards! With upbeat music in the background, Milena’s funny one-liners and Dheeraj’s funky blow horn, the awards ceremony was filled with fun and frolic. To add to the merriment were the HE ladies, who cheered on their peers for their achievements.

Enthusiastic Holiday Experts sure added the element of fun!Sweet Rewards and Surprises

First up were Manish Kalra and Deepak Rawat, who presented the awards for Outstanding Customer Service and Outbound Achievers. As the claps became louder, Devesh Khanna and Sanket Atal came on stage to give away accolades for the Great Festive Bonanza. And what fancy gadgets and goodies HEs got to take home!

The winning smiles of top performers

What’s more, each top winner was in for a sweet surprise – a beautiful message from her husband! To see husbands express love and pride for women in their lives was indeed the icing on the cake. (One lady shockingly exclaimed ‘are you sure that is from my husband?’)

Through the event, the pretty ladies were all praises for the MMT Operations team, especially Sushil Verma and Divyanshu Saxena (One Expert even went on to say ‘If all else fails, Divyanshu hails!’)

All hail the MMT Operations Team!

As the ‘Red Carpet Awards’, given for exceptional achievements in domestic and international travel, came to a close, Sushil sent the audience in bouts of laughter and kept them captivated with an incredible creative and witty speech.

The all too perfect evening concluded with high tea and delicious snacks including mouth-watering paneer tikkas and crispy French fries.

The first HE THM was a sure-shot success, as many Holiday Experts would enthusiastically agree, and I cannot wait for the event to come back with a bang next year!

Time to rock n' roll post the awards ceremony!By Rachita Verma

MAKEMYTRIP 'WALKS TO WORK' ON WORLD EARTH DAY

On a sunny Monday morning at 0800 hours, executives from MakeMyTrip, IBM, Nagarro Software, Accenture, Fidelity and other companies stepped out of their offices on a mission. The mission was to make Gurgaon congestion-free and pedestrian-friendly….

You might remember this “innocent” observer from THM 2012. Here’s presenting Gurpreet Bajaj’s rather unique take on the Walk to Work drive.

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

The initiation of the walk near the mysterious Pillar No. 106

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

Walking on the roads without any fear-that’s something you don't get to see every day!

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

Prejenting..Parag with a Raag

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

In between all the jokes, there were some serious messages

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

Spot Pranav singing Mujh Mein Hain Hero

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

Painting the town red

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

‘Deep’ Talk

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

Hemant seems exhausted. Looks like he started all the way from India Gate!

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

Girl Power-Always ladies 'firsht'

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

Main Akela Apni Dhun Mein Magan- Sanjay dreaming of a better tomorrow...

Photo Credit: Pranav Bhasin

Posing for the Gurgaon Times that never got published

Photo Credit: Amit Goswami

All opinions and views expressed in this blog are solely the author’s and are not meant to cause any harm or personal injury. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
	Swati Talwar is an avid traveller, an enthusiastic writer by day and a crime fighter by night. She enjoys staying in the cupboard under the stairs while humming her favourite tunes.

ABOUT The AUTHOR
	Shreya Sachar is a travel writer by profession. When not writing she’s busy in the kitchen creating treats from around the world. Grant her one wish and she would do nothing but travel. Her favourite places are Goa, Turkey and San Francisco.

Answers to Your Travel Queries Just an SMS Away

Mission: Create an SMS App

Brief: Imagine a product that would be a one stop for a traveller for any travel need whatsoever. One handy product to reduce the need to call customer care. One product that eliminates the numerous Google hits, the traveller makes, before he even starts planning his travel.” That was the Product brief.

Battle of the Brains: We already had exciting mobile apps. This time, for a change, we decided to tap the SMS channel. Discussions and meetings ensued, Hackathon (yes a marathon ‘rack your brains’ meeting) happened, a lot of ideas were thrown around and when the dust finally settled, we had more ideas than we could care to make sense of. We tried to understand the customers’ pain points, analyze user behavior and come up with a set of services we could go LIVE with. Intuitions were good but unless it was backed by data, back to drawing board we would have to go.

Version 1.0: A month later, we came out with the first version of @mmt, a service that lets you search flights and their current status, calculates driving distance and gives directions to a specific area in a city doubling up as a city guide with attractions and all. It can be used as a currency converter too.

Joys of Simple SMS-ing! Using new age technologies like NLP (Natural Language Processing), we ensured that this service handled a lot of disambiguity like typos and allowed the user to not worry about the format of the message. Who could ever have thought to find a flight by simply typing an SMS that says, “@mmt.search I and my wife want to fly from Bangalore to Delhi on Diwali”! Well our very intuitive and intelligent flight search service take care of such queries as well.

The Upgrade: We went a step further and followed @mmt with @bookings, which was launched exclusively for MakeMyTrip’s flight customers. You have an upcoming flight and need to call the customer care to get more information. Well, don’t. Simply SMS @bookings or better still give a missed call to 0124 – 6124451 and you get your booking details, flight status, terminal information, baggage allowance and even a mobile friendly e-ticket over SMS.

Getting Santa to Endorse Us! We even came up with an in-house funky video to describe the services and in light of the cheerful holiday spirit of MakeMyTrip, we chose the ultimate traveller, Santa (who else!) as our mascot. This short animation video was designed to educate our customers on all the @mmt services and directions on how to use them and we are pretty proud of how it shaped up. J

Check out this cool video 

Getting started: Just SMS @mmt to 9664896648 or 9266592665 and you will get a list of all available services. If you have an upcoming flight try giving a missed call to 0124 – 6124451 from the mobile number linked to your booking or simply SMS @bookings to 9664896648 from the linked mobile number and get all the booking details. You can also check out the details of @mmt at www.makemytrip.com/sms

When aliens took over my life for a week- a Non-Techie’s take on AWeSOM

Day 1

Let me start by telling you that until recently, the only cookie I knew of was the one that is calorific and the only Python I had heard of was the one that you are supposed to be frightened of.

It was a Friday evening and an idea nestled in my head of conducting an experiment and getting fellow Trippers to tweet about the upcoming AWeSOM (Awareness Week On Security, Online & Mobile) event. While I was still cradling the thought, two human looking aliens (read Piyush and Vikram) sneaked into my world and the rest as they say, is history.

Starting Monday, I was supposed to live-tweet the proceedings of AWeSOM from our MakeMyTrip Twitter handle. (Shame if you don’t know what our brand handle is by now). I was excited, enthused and bursting with ideas. I stepped into “Hindustan” for the inauguration and my world has not been the same since.

Inauguration of the AWeSOM event

It all started well and I liked what I heard. Proposed shift in our culture as a tech-organization, the security measures we must adopt and the quick response plan to handle critical situations was what the talk was about. It all made sense.

And then happened “Casablanca”.

It seemed like they were talking a different language. Apache, Memcache, Sharding, Parsing, Python, Perl, Splunk, Cookies, Logs and what not. My mind was whirling, trying to process all that was happening around me. It was, so to speak, an overhead transmission. I was tweeting, yes, from our brand handle but the trending hashtags in my head were such –

(Morning)  #NewFreakingExperimentYay

(By Mid-morning) #Whatthehellisgoingon

(Noon) #Thiscantbehappeningtome

(By evening, I had a revelation) #Theseguysarealiens

This, my friends, was Day 1 of AWeSOM for me. To be honest, I didn’t understand ANYTHING! I saw my experiment failing. But I am not one to give up easily. I mustered up all my courage and talked myself into attending Day 2 as well.

MMT Trippers @ work

The rest of the week

Day 2 started off with giving myself a pep talk. I was trying real hard to understand what they were saying. The speakers, the panel, the discussions and questions left me dizzy yet again. Popular hashtags for the day were something like this –

(Morning) #youcandothis

(Mid-morning) #areyoukiddingme

(Noon) #takeadeepbreathinandadeepbreathout

(Evening) #ihateflashsalesandaliens

I was beginning to understand.  Google hacking was as interesting to me as Physics to Sheldon Cooper. Offline chats about human hacking, with a practical example of the same on me courtesy our very own Mr. (Konark) Modi made me see online security in a different light altogether. There was indeed a bright light at the end of the tunnel and I was beginning to see it; so what if it was as bleak as my knowledge of Redis or Memcache. (You see I know the jargons now. Booyah!)

Day 3 I realized I had developed Stockholm Syndrome with the aliens. This occurred the minute I entered “Casablanca” to witness Matrix like effects- undoubtedly, the coolest sight of the week. Ping – Pong with the log data and making sense of it caught my attention. Mr. Modi was kind enough to explain logs to me in layman’s terms (But he did dodge the question of “What do you do with this info” by replying very slyly with “Trying to earn a living”).

The cool matrix-like effects were a definite showstopper

Our very own Mishraji from the Content team took coolness quotient to another level with Shakespeare in pink shades while elaborating on content security and the ways to deal with it.

Compliance too made a lot of sense. Why do you think we need compliance? And the right answer is NOT “for the heck of it”. You would have known if you were there. Alas.

Day 4 was even more interesting. Responsive design, Legalities in terms of obligations and rights as per our IPC and other governing bodies, App Sec (for the uninitiated, application security)and Performance Engineering, a lot of interesting stories, real cases and candid questions that were met with even more candid responses (courtesy Mr. Avutapalli) made the day brighter. The aliens looked like humans once again or maybe I was adapting! I was left wanting more, least to say.

A "serious" session on Content Security, in progress

Day 5 started off with the aliens back in their element, throwing jargons at me and I loved every minute of it. Why you may ask? The answer is that I learnt a lot in this week. So what if I still don’t understand VAPT, Sharding, Parsing, Single Identity Login, what Logs are, how SOX is not just a fancy word but has implications beyond belief, what to do when someone has plagiarized my writings and how Cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser and not just something you devour with milk in the morning!

Most importantly, I learnt, an open mind is more important than your educational background when it comes to learning new things.

The aliens are not so scary anymore. This was all in all a very informative week. For those who missed it and seek redemption, there are videos of the sessions you can browse through. For those who are still not interested, may Spock bless you. Peace.

The Week That Was AWESOM: A Techie’s Take

Awareness, Information Security, and Employee Responsibility – the three aims or as the AWeSOM wizards would say, ‘the three mantras’ of the AWeSOM (Awareness Week On Security, Online & Mobile) 2 at MakeMyTrip…

After a week of hectic activities, loads of interactive sessions, a few panel discussions and plenty of chai and samosas, we can proudly say that AWeSOM 2 was as big a success as AWeSOM 1.  Here are some numbers, just a glimpse of how big an event AWeSOM 2 was - 12 awareness sessions, 5 interactive sessions, 3 panel discussions, 367 attendees in total, and 193 Trippers in distinct presence!

With the completion of AWeSOM 2, we, at MakeMyTrip, have once again demonstrated (quite emphatically) that not only are we the India’s largest online travel company but we are also, perhaps, the most tech savvy of them all. 

 

Day 1: AWeSOM 2 kicked off at Hindustan with an AWeSOM video. It was followed by Sanket Atal sharing his experience with a real world hacker during his university days. The fun had just begun! Next, Trippers enthusiastically participated in a password cracking challenge and a total of 223 passwords were fed into the app! Loads of live and hands-on demonstrations were done to showcase the risk associated with vulnerabilities. These sessions also helped in equipping Trippers with tools, tips and tricks to detect them.

Day 2: The next day started with a panel discussion around “Tech Strategies” and went on to a live demonstration of “Google Hacking” techniques. Most interesting was the discussion on Mobile Security where the risks associated with being “un-aware” of common security threats that mobile devices and applications pose were highlighted.

Day 3: Discussions around Fraud & Risk Management at MakeMyTrip took centre stage on the third day of the AWeSOM week. Well, that is as it should be! After all, secure transactions are the biggest concern for any E-commerce company. But the presentation on Content Management did steal the thunder from Fraud & Risk Management – if only for a while. Love thy content, love thy blog – indeed!

Day 4: The following day got yet another feather in AweSOM 2’s cap! Kicked off by an in-depth view about application security standards at MakeMyTrip followed by Legal aspects; it ended with an interesting debate around Design, Development and Review (DDR).

The Final Day: Perhaps the issues most important (or most impactful, I should say) were discussed on Day 5 – Payment Security and Application Security. From the various sessions, it was clear that MakeMyTrip is dedicated and relentless about ensuring the security of our customers’ data.

And just like that, a week of learning came to an end! But not before achieving the set goals - Awareness, Information Security, and Employee Responsibility! Just like last year, this year too, the curtains fell on AWeSOM week amidst thunderous applause.