Dinkar Kamat

As I wanted to explore other opportunities in content, I joined MakeMyTrip as a Content Consultant for Visa Operations for a period of 6 months. While managing Visa Content Operations and Internal Communications, considering my writing skills, I was asked by the Blog Team to work on travel stories. Within a period of 2 months, while performing my role as a Consultant for Visa Content Operations, I published over 30 blogs on the company website. URL for blogs.

Due to my performance, my contract was extended for another 6 months, post which, I was asked to join the HotelsContent Team as a permanent employee. For Hotels Team, my primary role was to strategize partner content communications, which involved managing multiple vendors to conduct photoshoots of hotels, organising content databases and contributing toward marketing communications via room amenities cleanups, hotel facilities cleanups, area dedup tasks, hotel descriptions, emails and banner content.

Given this chance, I would like to talk about the work I did on these projects in the last 24 months. Though I’ve briefly explained the tasks I managed and accomplished, I’d be happy to explain them in detail whenever we chat to prove my calibre as a content resource for your organisation. Please do check the links I’ve given in the end of this cover letter to get an idea about the design impact and usability of these content projects.

• Hotel Photoshoots – Manually QC’d more than 1 lakh images for over 5000 Gold Hotels after managing photoshoots with various vendors, and getting them uploaded on our extranet.
• Area Dedup – Manually deduped 14500 areas in our DB to about 3500 areas after extensive research on Google Maps and blogs to identify hundreds of permutations and combinations that led to a comprehensive area cleanup to improve the visibility of our hotels.
• Places of Interest - Manually curated more than 15000 POIs in 92 Domestic and 42 international cities after extensive research.
• Project MatchMaker (MM) – Manually researched and identified about 1100 Popular Areas in 92 domestic and about 500 areas in 42 international cities, and matched them with our DB areas. Apart from this, I always ensured that I stayed involved with the tech team’s efforts to make sure MatchMaker runs smoothly without any major issues.
• MM INTL Area Categorization – Categorized all popular areas for Domestic (92 cities) + International (39 cities) into different buckets after research for about 1600 areas, and sequenced them inter and intra-category for UX design flow, on the basis of hotel count, booking count and area research through other sources online.
• MM INTL + DOM Area Info and Images – Wrote area level content for about 300 INTL (22 cities) and 100 DOM (9 cities) areas. Searched for hundreds of images on istock for 400 areas (INTL + DOM) and 134 cities. Downloaded images, got them resized and uploaded on cdn server.
• Project Paris - Creation of area guides for 27 International (300 areas approx.) and 3 Domestic (50 areas approx.) cities. This included curating data points, writing content, sourcing images, and other design and tech parameters to create a manual DB, which was turned into an API and Database to make the project go live.
• Hotel Facilities and Room Amenities Dedup – Deduplication of existing hotel facilities and amenities to below 25% of the existing count in our extranet.
• Alternate Accommodation – Manually tagged more than 6000 properties in different alt acco categories after extensive research about several property types, such as guest houses, villas, resorts etc.

As you can imagine, all this work required research on several sources, such as blogs, travel guides, Google maps, TripAdvisor, social media channels, traveller forums and other sources, to understand the customer mindset and the reason for emphasis on location while booking a stay in a hotel. These projects showed a collective conversion upside of more than 15% due to accuracy and good analytical placement of information as per UX design.

After closing this project, I wanted to explore other opportunities as a Freelance Content Consultant, before joining another reputed organization.