Travel planning is complex, requiring customers to navigate many interconnected choices. For MakeMyTrip, India’s largest online travel agency, design plays a crucial role in turning that complexity into seamless, stress-free experiences.

Aakash Kumar, Vice President & Head of Design at MakeMyTrip, has spent more than 13 years helping shape the company’s user experience across multiple products and brands. His team’s main goal is clear: reduce the cognitive load and provide travellers with the clarity to make decisions easily.

Using Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express and other Adobe Creative Cloud tools, MakeMyTrip is enabling AI-powered design that’s on-brand, scalable and customer-centric.

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Scaling design without slowing teams down.

Creating consistent marketing campaign assets across a multi-brand ecosystem — spanning airlines, hotels, holiday packages, bus tickets and travel visas — was once a major operational challenge for MakeMyTrip.

With Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Firefly, its designers can generate asset variations from static images to 3D designs and animations across the different brands’ guidelines, significantly reducing repetitive work. The time saved allows MakeMyTrip’s team to experiment faster, testing new designs for approval without slowing down ongoing campaigns.

Kumar notes that Firefly is helping his design team collaborate more seamlessly with other designers and stakeholders, making the creative process more iterative and dynamic. They also feel confident creating content with Firefly’s generative AI models, knowing they’re safe for commercial use.

Meanwhile, MakeMyTrip’s social media team uses Adobe Express extensively to produce on-brand social content at scale. Kumar highlights that the ability to quickly resize assets for different social formats in Adobe Express has been especially valuable to the team.

MakeMyTrip is also experimenting with Zero UI and agentic AI to enable automated interactions that streamline workflows and free up its designers to focus on impactful creative decisions.

Using creativity as a problem-solving tool.

Booking travel can be stressful. Rates fluctuate, weather varies and availability changes in real time, adding to customers' mental load.

At MakeMyTrip, creativity plays a practical role in solving that problem. Rather than focusing purely on visual expression, the company also applies creative thinking to how information is organised across products — putting themselves in the travellers’ shoes to help simplify their booking journey.

This philosophy extends to enhanced experiences like conversational AI, where customers can interact with MakeMyTrip’s AI-powered assistant, Myra, to plan and book trips. The goal remains the same: reduce friction in the planning process so travellers can focus less on logistics and more on the excitement of their journey ahead.

Designing for what matters most.

At MakeMyTrip, design ultimately centres on customers’ peace of mind. While AI innovation continues to evolve, Kumar emphasises that designers remain responsible for “taste” — a quality he believes machines cannot replace.

Designers play a crucial role in ensuring every customer touchpoint is trustworthy and intuitive. By freeing them from repetitive, day-to-day tasks, MakeMyTrip enables its design team to apply human judgment and expertise where it matters most, guiding experiences that align with travellers’ expectations.

As AI adoption accelerates, Kumar says businesses must strike the right balance between innovation and responsibility. With Adobe powering its creative workflows, MakeMyTrip continues to design experiences that are not just efficient, but trustworthy and customer centric.