- Ixigo CEO and co-founder Aloke Bajpai said
employees will be also be given ESOPs at discounted rates
- Ixigo employees had taken 25-60% pay cuts
during the lockdown, while the company’s founders had taken 100% pay cuts
- The company held on to its plan of not laying off anyone during the lockdown
Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder of Ixigo, an online travel aggregator,
on Wednesday, wrote on Twitter that the company would be restarting full
payment of salaries to its employees from July.
Bajpai added that 2.3% of shares in the company will be given in ESOPs
(Employee Stock Ownership Plan), which will cover the entire workforce of the
company. Half of these ESOPs, which give employees an ownership interest in the
company, will be given at a very discounted rate with 1 year vesting period.
Bajpai also said that the company will prioritise remote working till the end
of the current year. “Proud moment. Just to add: no layoffs and most ixigems
took 25-60% pay cut for 5 months! That’s the part worth celebrating,” Bajpai
wrote.
In March this year, Ixigo had announced that the leadership team would
take 60% pay cuts, while other employees would take 25-50% pay cuts, as the
coronavirus pandemic and the resultant lockdown brought travel activities to a
grinding halt. The central government suspended all domestic flights on March 25 followed
by a suspension of international flights a day after. Passenger trains and
public transportation were also shut. Ixigo founders Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar
themselves took 100% pay cuts, as part of their plan to not lay off any
employee during the lockdown, even if it meant some employees having no work
for a few months.
“We bit the bullet and said we wanna find a path that gets us there
without letting people go, even if it means that six months down the line, if
things don’t improve right and travel is even more deeply impacted, we may all
go down together but that’s the risk that we are willing to take,” Bajpai said
during a session in March this year.
Founded in 2006 by Bajpai and Kumar, Ixigo has a user base of 150 Mn
travellers and more than 5 Mn downloads on the Google Play Store. It claims to
help users with personalised travel recommendations and tailor-made travel
packages with its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Ixigo’s example of not laying off any employees was a rarity in the
Indian startup ecosystem, with a host of companies such as hospitality unicorn
Oyo Rooms, cab-hailing unicorn Ola and online marketplace Quikr, among others, laying
off as much as 30% of their workforce due to falling revenues during the
lockdown. Gurugram-headquartered foodtech unicorn Zomato was another notable
addition in this list, as it laid off 13% of its workforce, close to 5000
employees in May.
