Travel has now become a way of life. People travel not just to visit places, but to learn and experience about varied cultures across the globe. From a solo backpacker to a group of travellers, Mumbai-based TripXOXO claims to be India's first online travel website offering largest selection of tours and activities to Outbound travellers.

TripXOXO enables travellers to discover and plan their itinerary by providing them with an array of unique and less explored areas to visit. This service completes the tripod of a holiday, while a traveller may book tickets and stays through other online travel agencies, TripXOXO`s services will be of great help once he/she arrived at the destination.

Leisure Travel Space Trends


With the advancement of technologies, the concept of tourism has evolved drastically over the years. There has been a tremendous technological shift, and people are now moving from computers to mobile phones for many purposes. Mostly, all search and discovery processes are happening a lot over mobile phones. However, the majority of bookings are happening through the website from a laptop or a PC. Travelling is not restricted to just visiting different places and sight-seeing, it has evolved as a mean of exploring and experiencing varied forms of lifestyles and cultures. Both inbound and outbound travellers look forward to more than just visiting places. They want to explore new horizons, try different cuisines and submerge into enjoying the destination`s lifestyle, etc. Travellers look out for customised trips, adventure sports, camping under the shining stars, boutique hotels and some even go to the extent of learning different cuisines. TripXOXO is a young start-up in the online travel space that allows tourists to plan sightseeing tours as per their choice.

Idea Conceptualization and Execution


TripXOXO is a disruptive travel platform that offers all solutions a traveller needs once arrived at a destination. Heena Akhtar, founder of TripXOXO, is a homeopathic doctor by education and a travel enthusiast. She has chosen to follow her passion and founded, TripXOXO, in 2015 as a go-to destination for travellers looking for fantastic activities & trips, enjoyable experience and exciting deals. Heena says, “Looking at Indian travel landscape, the internet is cluttered by airline websites, Indian online travel agencies and international companies which offer both tickets & stay bookings. We realised that there is no dedicated travel portal which services the needs of a traveller who looks for experiences, activities, and support like airport transfers. There is clearly a huge vacuum, and we aim to fill the same. With the evolution of human mindset from tourist to a traveller, people now look forward to experiencing the culture of the destination they are travelling to. Hence, the market for things-to-do and activities is growing very rapidly.” She adds "We are not a regular travel company. We have an array of services to travellers like - transfer services at more than 2000 airports, hassle-free ticket bookings for amusements around the globe, food experiences at lesser explored destinations including local assistance with multilingual support and much more."

Before TripXOXO, Heena founded TravelPort, q parent company of TripXOXO, along with Javed in 2002. TravelPort started as a small garage start-up, which has today grown to become one of the leading offline travel agency in India. Currently, the TripXOXO is also funded by its parent company Travelport Holidays India Pvt Ltd.

Tapping the right opportunities


TripXOXO is focused on the Indian market for now and has curated prices and content suitable to the Indian market. Also, as being a specialist it has a structured approach and is offering many experiential tours providers to join the platform. Heena adds, “We have a variety of offers designed to benefit travel service providers of all sorts. We are also looking at working collaboratively with some tourism industry giants to enhance our activities. We have different suites of benefits designed for the good of all type of travel service providers. We are also partnering with many big travel companies for enhancement of our activities section.” Heena explains further, “Contrary to other travel portals like Makemytrip and Trivago; we do not offer hotels and air-ticket or pre-packaged tours. We specialise in everything that a traveller requires after tickets and stays are booked. From tours & activities, transfers, tickets to attractions, etc. We also let the traveller plan the trip based on their interests.”

Changing the Way of Travelling


TripXOXO provides fun-tasting options to discover and book activities, attractions, monumental tours, concerts, sport event tickets, etc. across the destinations visitors arrive at. Explaining more about the business strategy of TripXOXO Heena adds, “We were more focused on Indian outbound travellers, but recently we have also launched some activities for the inbound travellers as well too. We are offering particular experiences across all cities in India enabling our guests to experience our rich and varied culture and culinary.” Both international and domestic travellers can book sight-seeing trips, monumental tours, culinary tours and much more with TripXOXO. She claims, “We provide travellers with over 25000+ trip ideas across 140+ countries, 150+ categories of thematic tours, airport transfer services at 2000+ locations, hassle-free ticket bookings for amusements across the globe with the comfort of paying in INR.” Tours like the Royal London Free Tour, Prague Free Tour and adding 150+ more on the list are free of cost. From Burj Khalifa, Dubai to Eifel Tower, Paris, the list of grand and exclusive heritage tours ranges to 300+ locations for which the entry, if chargeable, can be paid on the TripXOXO website itself, in INR.

Future Ahead


At present, TripXOXO has 4000+ page visits each day. It is focused on improvising its product offerings on a regular basis by enhancing the quality of its services. Heena adds, “We aim to offer more than 35,000 activities & experiences in the next 3 months enabling, Indian travellers with ll have a huge range of travel options tremendous experiences available. We are also reaching out to B2C clients through digital, and print and outdoor campaigns which will be rolled out in the next quarter. We are even also partnering with airlines, tourism boards, online travel agencies, partner travel agents and other online websites. We plan to launch TripXOXO in the UAE by 2017.”

Conclusion


In a nutshell, the Indian travel industry is full of opportunities. Heena concludes, “We realised those tremendous partnership opportunities would be a great way of reaching to a wider customer base. We have received fabulous responses from online and offline travel companies to partner with them for specific activities section and also many other online non-compete companies. This has opened for us, a massive door of opportunities and we have made it part of our core strategy.”

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