Booking.com opens the OTA index at 88%, with MakeMyTrip the only Indian challenger inside striking distance.

Day one of the Flight & Hotel OTAs arc finds a foreign incumbent on top across every engine: Booking.com lands at 88% SoV, ahead of MakeMyTrip at 68.7% and ixigo at 43.3%.

Gemini is the most Booking-friendly surface (92% SoV), AI Mode the most MakeMyTrip-friendly (78%, the closest any Indian brand gets to parity).

The citation pool tells the same story numerically — makemytrip.com is the single most-cited domain at 43 citations, but stayvista.com (24), skyscanner.co.in (21) and app-store listings on play.google.com (36) and apps.apple.com (21) are doing the heavy lifting for the category, none of them owned by the Indian challenger pack.

EaseMyTrip is the most engine-asymmetric brand in the set: rank 5 on AI Mode (38% SoV) but rank 9 on ChatGPT (16%).

On day one, the structural read is that AI search for Indian OTA queries is being won by a Dutch-headquartered platform whose brand the models treat as the default global noun for 'book a hotel'.

The Indian challengers cluster in a second tier where mentions are roughly proportional to app-store footprint — play.google.com and apps.apple.com together account for 57 citations, more than any editorial domain in the pool, which means visibility today is a function of being a listed app, not of being a cited brand in journalism.

The opportunity for MakeMyTrip, ixigo, Goibibo and EaseMyTrip is the editorial gap: the third-party domains driving Booking's lead skyscanner.co.instayvista.comthomascook.in are aggregators and partners, not journalism.

Win the journalism layer and the gap closes. "On day one, Booking.com is the default; the Indian OTAs are the alternatives."