Exclusive: TravelTriangle lays off over 250 employees due to COVID crisis

Travel and hospitality businesses have been hit the worst globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the virus has impacted online travel agencies or OTAs, hotel chains and ancillary services severely. Country’s largest OTA MakeMyTrip has slashed salaries across all levels and now TravelTriangle has carried out mass layoffs.

According to three Entrackr sources, the company has laid off about 50% of its workforce in the past 10 days. “TravelTriangle has fired about 250-300 people since March 20,” said one of the sources on condition of anonymity. 

“Impacted employees are from operations, marketing, customer support and business development functions.” Sources also said that a large chunk of the laid-off employees were not paid their standard severance package.

TravelTriangle is an online marketplace for holiday packages. Its business has been almost standstill for the past three to five weeks and a now near hard stop triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has added to their woes.

TravelTriangle had about 600 employees until last week.

“Since the company has been experiencing almost nil business this month and things are likely to be the same for the next few months or more, it has resorted to a mass layoff,” added the second source. He also wished not to be named.

Only four months ago, TravelTriangle had raised Rs 93.5 crore from South Korea-based KB Global Platform fund and the Nandan Nilekani-led The Fundamentum Partnership Fund I. Sources emphasised that the company is conserving resources and capital to sustain the tough time.

Entrackr had sent a detailed questionnaire to TravelTraingle’s co-founder and CEO Sankalp Agarwal on Thursday. However, we are yet to receive any response. We will update the post as and when he does.

TravelTriangle has become the first startup in the travel and hospitality sector to execute mass layoffs. Experts believe that if the situation doesn’t get better after April 15, then many companies in the space would be forced to fire their employees. 

GO-MMT had slashed salaries of their leaders, senior management and mid-level employees as it prepared to deal with the pandemic. Entrackr had reported about the development in detail on Thursday.

“Salary cut is inevitable. Several other companies in the sector are planning to implement salary cuts and possible layoffs to conserve cash,” said the above-quoted person. “Moreover, as the road ahead remains unclear, TravelTriangle may go for another round of layoffs.”

India is currently in its fourth week since the first batch of Covid-19 positive cases were identified. The startup ecosystem in India has taken a major hit and entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to run their operations by cutting costs in trying to stay afloat.