Is MakeMyTrip Influencing the Hotel Prices You See? Short-Selling Controversy Explained

Most people who book hotels on MakeMyTrip assume the prices they see are simply what the hotel charges. MakeMyTrip, they figure, is just the window they are looking through.

However, according to a March 30 report by US-based short-selling research firm Morpheus Research, that assumption may be wrong. The report alleges that MakeMyTrip, India's largest online travel agency (OTA), has for years been quietly controlling hotel prices across its platform in ways that India's antitrust regulator, CCI, declared illegal in 2022. It claims that the OTA never really stopped.

The report makes for uncomfortable reading, not just for MakeMyTrip's investors, but for the millions of Indians who book hotels through the app every day without a second thought.

Notably, the timing is particularly awkward. Even as the allegations land, MakeMyTrip is actively courting India, pitching itself to regulators, investors, and consumers as a company poised for its next chapter of growth. The two narratives could not be more different.

MakeMyTrip's India Story

In a recent filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), MakeMyTrip painted an ambitious picture of its India ambitions, and announced it is evaluating a potential listing on Indian stock exchanges. It believes this move can be a "catalyst to further boost its brand in its core market, strengthen its leadership in India and support longer-term growth." Such a listing would open the company up to domestic institutional and retail investors, and give it India-listed equity to deploy for future acquisitions.

The numbers it presents are striking. The company says it has served 87 million lifetime transacted retail customers, sold over 232.5 million hotel room nights, clocked 2,549 million app downloads, and counts over 77,000 SME and large corporate customers. It has also completed an internal restructuring, merging RedBus India into MakeMyTrip (India) Private Limited to bring its key brands under a single entity.

On the demand side, the company remains bullish, citing a growing middle class, rising travel spending, accelerating digital adoption, and the continued under-penetration of organised travel services as long-term structural tailwinds. In its own words, India's travel demand outlook is nothing short of "robust."

It is against this backdrop of confidence and expansion that the Morpheus Research report arrives asking whether the foundation of that growth story is as clean as the company claims.

CCI Already Said Something Was Wrong

This is not a case of allegations emerging out of nowhere. In 2022, India's Competition Commission (CCI) fined MakeMyTrip ₹223 crore, roughly $26.1 million, after a formal investigation found it had engaged in "anti-competitive" and "abusive" practices. The specific offence was price parity. MakeMyTrip was allegedly telling hotels they could not sell rooms cheaper anywhere else, not on rival apps or even on their own websites. For a platform controlling over 50% of India's online travel market, the CCI ruled, this was not just bad behaviour. It was a market distortion.

MakeMyTrip appealed the fine, paid a 10% deposit, and publicly declared it had already "voluntarily addressed" the problem. Case closed, it seemed.

Except, according to Morpheus Research, it wasn't.

Same Trick, New Name

After interviewing 103 industry insiders, former MakeMyTrip employees, hotel executives and industry body leaders, Morpheus Research alleges that price parity never went away. It just got rebranded.

A former MakeMyTrip manager told the firm that hotels are held to a "parity score", checked "on a daily basis." An executive at OYO, one of MakeMyTrip's largest hotel partners, explained the mechanics with striking clarity, "[MakeMyTrip] do not call it price parity but 'price competitiveness score' because legally they cannot call it price parity...So even without any contractual obligation, if I'm losing my ranking and business on MakeMyTrip, I then become by themselves obliged to give them the similar prices."

A leader from the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), the body that originally brought the complaint to the CCI, was blunter still. Price parity is "still there," they said, and MakeMyTrip "got away with it" by simply ignoring the regulator.

In August 2025, Indian tech outlet Medianama found price parity language in a hotel contract still publicly available on MakeMyTrip subsidiary Goibibo's website. Two days after that article was published, the page reportedly went offline.

Invisible Hand Behind Search Results

The more unsettling allegation is not what hotels are contractually obligated to do, it is what happens when they don't comply. According to the report, MakeMyTrip enforces pricing discipline through "deboosting", which is quietly burying non-compliant hotels so deep in search results that they effectively cease to exist on the platform.

A ClearTrip executive told the research firm that MakeMyTrip has been approaching hotels with a stark choice: "Either MakeMyTrip or ClearTrip. Obviously, they can't go ahead and put this on paper, but this is what they're saying." Hotels that push back, the executive said, are ones that will "never surface" in search results and often won't even know why their bookings have dried up.

If true, this matters enormously to consumers. The hotel rankings we see on MakeMyTrip may not reflect quality, value, or relevance. They may reflect compliance.

Second Investigation Nobody Mentioned

Buried in a peer-reviewed academic paper, Morpheus Research claims to have found evidence of a fresh CCI investigation opened in March 2024 into whether MakeMyTrip's pricing practices amount to a "hub-and-spoke" conspiracy, a cartel-level offence under Indian competition law.

A legal expert quoted in the report described it plainly, "A hub-and-spoke conspiracy is looked at under the cartel offence under competition law. It is considered, it is deemed, to be unlawful."

The CCI's own website appears to confirm a case number matching the investigation. MakeMyTrip has reportedly made no disclosure of this to shareholders and not a single analyst has asked about it on an earnings call.

This is also where the India listing ambition becomes a more loaded question. A company seeking fresh domestic capital, from retail investors who book its app and trust its brand, while allegedly sitting on an undisclosed regulatory investigation is a tension that Indian market regulators will inevitably scrutinise.

The Part That Changes Everything

Here is what one must hold in thier head while reading all of the above. Morpheus Research has financially bet that MakeMyTrip's stock will fall. The firm disclosed this openly by giving a disclaimer, "Morpheus Research holds short positions in MMYT". This means that it stands to profit directly if this report damages the company's reputation and sends its share price downward.

Short sellers have exposed genuine corporate fraud before. But they have also been wrong, or selective with facts, when money was on the line. The two things can be true simultaneously; the allegations can be worth investigating, and the report can be self-serving.

The market, for now, appears sceptical of the drama. MakeMyTrip's stock closed at $37.29 on March 31, the day after the report dropped. The shares actually gained 2.53% on the day. Investors, at least in the immediate aftermath, were not running for the exits.

Two Different Stories About Same Company

What makes this moment genuinely interesting is the collision of two competing narratives arriving at the same time.

On one side, a company presenting itself as the indispensable engine of India's travel boom, 87 million customers, hundreds of millions of hotel room nights, a march toward a dual listing that would bring it closer to its home market than ever before.

On the other, a short-seller alleging that the practices powering that dominance were declared illegal three years ago, were never truly abandoned and that a second, more serious investigation may already be underway.

Both cannot be entirely true. But both are worth taking seriously, because at the centre of this story is not a stock price or a regulatory fine. It is the simple question of whether the app that hundreds of millions of Indians trust to find them the best deal is actually doing that.