Ixigo’s Co-CEO Says He Rebuilt His App From Scratch to Fight ChatGPT
Photo Credit: Ixigo Co-Founder and Co-CEO Rajnish Kumar at the Skift India Forum 2025 in Delhi. Skift
Skift Take
Ixigo’s latest move comes as travel apps face pressure to do more than list fares, rooms and routes. They now have to help users make decisions faster and with less friction, without sending them elsewhere for answers.
Ixigo on Wednesday announced the relaunch of its app under a new identity — Ixigo Next — designed to act less like a booking site and more like a travel assistant that understands requests, guides choices, and carries out tasks on its own.
The goal, said Co-Founder and Group Co-CEO Rajnish Kumar, is to keep the users with Ixigo and off new AI competitors like ChatGPT.
“The risk is that as these AI platforms become more powerful, they won't just answer questions, they'll solve the entire travel journey end-to-end,” Kumar told Skift in an exclusive conversation. “At that point, users may not come back to your app at all.”
Kumar said Ixigo Next is more than a chatbot bolted onto an existing product. He created what he calls a “NewCo inside OldCo” — a small team tasked with rebuilding the product using AI as the base layer.
“Those (companies) that don’t become AI-native will eventually become irrelevant, and the same a
