Morpheus Research says MakeMyTrip ‘openly defies regulators, scams customers’

In a recently published report, Morpheus Research says that MakeMyTrip (MMYT), a $3.5B online travel agency that is sometimes referred to as the “Booking.com of India” with 50% of the Indian OTA market, “openly defies regulators, scams customers, and pads profits through accounting tricks. “Our investigation, involving interviews with 103 industry experts including former employees, reveals that MakeMyTrip is engaged in abusive and anti-competitive practices despite a significant penalty and stop order from the Indian government in 2022. We also found evidence of a new and undisclosed regulatory investigation from the Director General of the Competition Commission of India, whose findings and potential actions are coming in ‘early 2026,’ according to a peer-reviewed paper. Further, MakeMyTrip is obfuscating its deteriorating financial performance through earnings management tricks, downplaying significant competitive threats while quietly losing market share, and systematically misleading customers through manipulative dark patterns, chronic refund issues, and by allowing ‘bad actor’ hotels to proliferate across its platform,” the report reads. Overall, Morpheus believes MakeMyTrip is “faltering under competitive pressure while attempting to maintain the perception of its market dominance through abusive and anti-competitive practices, aggressive accounting, and the increasingly deceptive extraction of value from its customers.”