Review: MakeMyTrip Lite falls short on the frugal factor

Travel booking company MakeMyTrip has released a new app called MakeMyTrip Lite to reach out to users on patchy networks. It is free to download but is currently available for Android devices only. It takes up just 5 MB of space after installation while the original MakeMyTrip app takes 84 MB of space.

Similar layout, limited features

Despite the smaller footprint, MakeMyTrip Mini has a colourful interface, like the original app. The booking categories show at the top, the photo slider with new offers occupy the centre of the home page and the top discounts displayed as cards come after it.

At first glance it’s hard to tell the difference between the two apps. A closer look reveals that the Stories section on the original MakeMyTrip app where you can read travel blogs by other users has been left out. The number of discount cards are less. In booking categories, train and bus booking have been given a miss.

So with the new app you can book a hotel room, order a cab and reserve a flight ticket. A new section called Homestay has been added. It is similar to the Airbnb app where users can find locals letting out an apartment or room to travellers for a few days at affordable prices. In Homestay, you can find small apartments or houses let out by owners.

Despite the smaller footprint the app carries lots of images to show what the rooms in hotels and homestays look like.

Needs improvement

To test the performance of the new app, we closed all other apps on a smartphone and used the Lite app for a while. The RAM usage jumped to almost 90MB in a few minutes of browsing. With the original app, the RAM usage went up to 100MB in the same amount of time. That isn’t much of a difference, to be honest. Clearly, the Lite app is as resource-intensive as the original app. Also, the pages were visibly not loading any faster when the smartphone was on a 2G network.

The MakeMyTrip Lite app has a smaller footprint but when it comes to using up less resources or optimising performance on slower networks, it struggles. It needs a lot more fine-tuning.