The Delhi High Court has shut down Yatra Online Limited’s attempt to corner the market on the word “Yatra,” ruling that the term is far too generic to be owned by any single company.
The dispute arose when Yatra Online tried to block Mach Conferences and Events Limited from offering travel services under the names BookMyYatra and BookMyYatra.com. The company claimed the marks were deceptively similar and crafted to exploit Yatra’s brand, which it said had become a household name since 2006, boasting over 15 million customers and a turnover crossing ₹5,600 crore in FY 2023–24.
Justice Tejas Karia, however, was unconvinced. The Court noted that yatra literally means “journey” or “travel” in Hindi—a word deeply woven into everyday language and used by countless travel operators across the country. In the Court’s view, no company could claim to have transformed such a common word into something exclusively its own.
“Generic or descriptive expressions do not point to origin or source, nor do they acquire trademark status unless they shed their primary meaning. Everyday words cannot be monopolised,” the judgment observed.
Adding weight to this stance, the Court pointed out that Yatra’s own trademark registrations carried disclaimers making it clear that exclusivity over the word itself was never granted. Those disclaimers, the Court reminded, serve precisely to prevent companies from stretching their rights beyond what the law allows.
On the question of whether long use had given Yatra a “secondary meaning,” the Court was firm: that bar had not been met. For a secondary meaning to emerge, the original descriptive sense must fade, and competitors must refrain from using it. Evidence instead showed the opposite—dozens of travel operators across India had continued to use the word.
The defendant’s brand identity, the Court held, was further shaped by the prefix BookMy, a formulation already familiar in the online booking space. Looked at as a whole, BookMyYatra and BookMyYatra.com were deemed sufficiently distinguishable from Yatra’s mark.
As for Yatra’s claim that the “.com” suffix gave it a unique edge, the Court was categorical: domain suffixes are generic, incapable of granting exclusivity.
With that, the interim injunction Yatra had secured in December 2024 was lifted, and Mach Conferences was free to use its chosen marks.
The ruling reinforces a consistent principle in trademark law—that businesses cannot transform everyday language into private property. In this case, “yatra” will remain what it always has been: a word belonging to all who travel.
