Yatra has laid off another 400 employees after they furloughed 600 employees earlier. The Covid-19 pandemic has come down hard on the online travel agency company as recently US-based software company Ebix walked out from the proposal of acquiring the business after a year of announcing the deal.
Yatra was suffering losses in business even before the pandemic and things have become worse for them now.
Travel and hospitality startups are seeing the worst effects of the pandemic than any other business sector. With flights, trains, and hotel bookings shut down during the lockdown, there was no business for these sectors.
A spokesperson for Yatra revealed that some segments of the business for Yatra would take more time to recover compared to the others. This is why the number of employees has been sized down and more than 350 employees of Yatra have been affected because of this downsizing.
The senior executives working in the company have already been informed that there would be a deduction in salaries and no increment in their remuneration.
Besides Yatra, there are several other Indian travel tech startups that have laid down their employees in the past two months to preserve their resources. TravelTriangle, MakeMyTrip, FabHotels and Oyo, all fall in this list. TravelTriangle laid off 300 employees while MakeMyTrip asked 350 employees working with them, to resign. Treebo and Fab have also fired workers from their company, and Oyo too has furloughed many of its workforces.
The worse is yet to come and the travel tech startups might lay off more employees in future because the travel and hotel industry might take months to get stable. Smaller startups may not have enough resources to survive for a longer period and are likely to shut down completely.
Conclusion :
We hope Yatra, along with other travel tech startups, get their business up and running soon.
