Travel Startup Thrillophilia Announces Partnership with Tourism Authority of Thailand

Thrillophilia.com, India’s biggest online platform for booking 10,000+ activities and experiences, has tied-up with Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) to promote Thailand's most unique and off-beat experiences focusing on adventure, art, culture, and luxury. With this, Thrillophilia will also help in the overall efforts to promote Thailand as a value-for-money niche destination.

Thailand is one of the most sought after foreign travel destinations in India with Indians ranking sixth among nationalities visiting Thailand. With an estimated 50 million Indian tourists expected to travel abroad by 2020, Thailand is poised to have an increased influx of approximately 2 million Indian tourists in 2019. With this partnership between Thrillophilia and TAT, the objective is to allow these Indian travellers to explore the undiscovered parts of Thailand, beyond the Bangkok-Pattayacircuit to less popular and off-beat destinations such as Chiang Rai, Ko Samui, Khao Yai, Chiang Mai etc.

While working with TAT, Thrillophilia has brought more than 100 unique experiences online which are now available for booking on Thrillophilia.com. Travellers can discover and book experiences such as Flight of the Gibbon in Chiang Mai, Art in Paradise in Pattaya, Temple Tour in Chiang Rai, Death Railway in Kanchanaburi, Adventure at Khao Yai, Khao Sok tour and more. This partnership also seeks to encourage more Indian women travellers to travel to Thailand, by highlighting special experiences revolving around them such as culinary lessons, Muay Thai boxing classes, meditation in temples etc.

Further, to drive awareness about these activities and experiences among Indian travellers who are shifting focus towards offbeat and adventure activities, Thrillophilia is actively promoting the unique experiences on its online channels and also doing marketing and social media campaigns around the theme: “Experience Thailand Differently”.

Chitra Gurnani Daga, CEO of Thrillophilia said, “Thailand has been one of the safest countries to travel in Asia. Thai people are some of the most kind, gentle and welcoming people on the planet. We are quite excited with this partnership, and I am really glad that some of the best local experiences of Thailand will now be available in India to book before one actually travels. It is an Instagram world and Thailand, with its pristine beauty and unique experiences makes for a perfect choice for this generation’s traveller. We are also working on a series of videos to promote these experiences across different channels."

Addressing the partnership with Thrillophilia, Ms. Cholada Shiddhivarn, Director of Tourism Authority of Thailand Mumbai Office said, “In addition to the breathtaking beaches and gorgeous nightlife, which are already known. There is an abundance of experiences that Thailand has to offer to its visitors. As a destination, we want to reach out to the millennials who are constantly seeking for offbeat experiences and also adventure sports. Thrillophilia serves as an ideal platform to reach out to these digitally savvy audiences and help us influence their travel choice. Through this association, we are aiming to introduce and promote New Shades of Amazing Thailand to the new age Indian traveler”.

Travel Portal Musafir.com To Invest Rs 120 Crore In India By 2018

UAE based online travel company Musafir.com is planning to invest Rs 120 crore over the next four years in India as it looks to expand it's presence in the country. Musafir.com was launched in India in October last year. By 2018, the company aspires to be among the top five online travel agencies in India

"We plan to invest Rs 120 crore for expanding our presence in India by 2018. The investments will be mainly for marketing campaigns and enhancement of product," Musafir.com Co-Founder and Managing Director Sachin Gadoya told PTI.

The online travel firm also plans to increase its offices in India. It currently has a office in Mumbai. "We will be opening more offices in India. Our second office will be opened at Gurgaon by March 31, 2015. The other offices will come up in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Pune," Gadoya added.

Right now the company has around 120 people in Mumbai and will be adding to the employees strength.

Apart from strengthening presence in India, the company is looking at Nepal and Sri Lanka. Musafir.Com currently provides access to flights for 3,000 destinations on over 270 airlines besides helping access to 75,000 hotel properties.

Notably, Sachin Tendulkar is also a minority stakeholder in Musafir.com India business. Musafir.com was founded by Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Thani, Sachin Gadoya and Albert Dias in August 2007 and was inaugurated by Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Thani on April 23, 2009 and launched in India in 23 October 2013.

Online Travel Community Start-up Tripoto Raises Seed Funding Of $400,000

Delhi-based online travel community start-up Tripoto has raised seed funding of $400,000 (Rs 2.4 crore apprx.) from investment led by Outbox Ventures. Palaash Ventures also participated in this round along with 10 more investors, including Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and Makemytrip and TrulyMadly.com cofounder Sachin Bhatia. Co-founder of LetsVenture Shanti Mohan are also one of the angel investors who participated.

The startup will use funds for scaling up technology and expansion of the global travel community. "We hope to attract more users to share their travel stories and we hope a scale in technology will help," said Anirudh Gupta, Co-Founder of Tripoto who co-founded Tripoto with his Indian School of Business (ISB) colleague Michael Lyngdoh.

Before launching Tripoto, Anirudh was part of the founding team of Notion Ink, and also worked for Rocket Internet as an Entrepreneur in Residence (Middle East), while Michael is a serial entrepreneur.

Tripoto is a social platform to share and discover amazing travel experiences. Tripoto's rich chronicling experience lets its users record trip photos, locations, videos and descriptions to help others re-create travel experience.



Tripoto claims to be one of the largest community of Travelers in the world with around 300,000 monthly unique visitors and over 650,000 unique page views. Tripoto is crowd-sourcing amazing travel itineraries from around the world. Tripoto allows travelers to share their travel stories and discover amazing itineraries by real travelers.

Tripoto focuses on travel information that is offbeat and difficult to discover. It eases the process of searching and discovering independent, authentic and personalized travel information on a single platform.

New Travel Portal 'Travelaero' Synchronizing travel - Hotels, Flights & Car Rentals

Another travel portal has been launched in the market. Travelaero.com, which is a Mumbai/Dubai based startup, announced the launch of its portal on 17^th September, 2014. The startup has partnered with some of the leading brands and will provide the users with travel itinerary, online booking facility and easy car rentals etc. with the launch of its online portal. The main focus of the startup is to cover the resident expats in United Arab Emirates, Dubai and international travelers visiting Dubai. The startup wants to provide the users with complete travel solution ranging from Flights, Hotel and car rentals.

Travelaero.com has since long been evaluating strategies to establish its brand value in the market. As a part of its plan, it has for now launched a very easy and user friendly portal which will be further enhanced in the near future by introducing more customer centric approach based on the usability.

According to Mr. Rakesh Uthaman, CEO of Travelaero.com, "Travelaero aims to become one of the top travel portals in the region by 2015. As the product is very young and under development, our concept for travel holds lots of potential for the Global markets as well. We are doing a series of action to get in quick launch of the customer centric travel platform with lots of features, meanwhile keeping it simple". He also added, "At present we are open for online bookings, soon in a couple of months, we would be ready to take up telephone and direct bookings as well. Having studied the market potential, we are planning to open offices in multiple metropolitan cities in India and United Arab Emirates".

The portal describes itself as a "One-Stop" travel portal for cheap Airfares, best Hotel accommodations and lowest Car Rentals. Further, Vacation packages, Tour packages and Travel store will be launched soon.

The new portal might give competition to established travel portals in India such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra.com or ClearTrip, as Travelaero is different in a way that along with flight and hotel bookings it also have an extra feature of booking/renting cars. However what is available in MakeMyTrip is not there in Travelaero i.e. Bus ticket bookings. Moreover, Makemytrip and other established travel portal in India has large loyal user-base so Travelaero has to have something different which can pull those loyal customers from other portals.

The portal has very strict cancellation and refund policies. In some of the cases, the bookings are non-refundable and further, if you don't cancel in advance you may also incur a "no-show" fee in addition to any other supplier fees charged.

New Travel Portal 'Travelaero' Synchronizing travel - Hotels, Flights & Car Rentals

Another travel portal has been launched in the market. Travelaero.com, which is a Mumbai/Dubai based startup, announced the launch of its portal on 17^th September, 2014. The startup has partnered with some of the leading brands and will provide the users with travel itinerary, online booking facility and easy car rentals etc. with the launch of its online portal. The main focus of the startup is to cover the resident expats in United Arab Emirates, Dubai and international travelers visiting Dubai. The startup wants to provide the users with complete travel solution ranging from Flights, Hotel and car rentals.

Travelaero.com has since long been evaluating strategies to establish its brand value in the market. As a part of its plan, it has for now launched a very easy and user friendly portal which will be further enhanced in the near future by introducing more customer centric approach based on the usability.

According to Mr. Rakesh Uthaman, CEO of Travelaero.com, "Travelaero aims to become one of the top travel portals in the region by 2015. As the product is very young and under development, our concept for travel holds lots of potential for the Global markets as well. We are doing a series of action to get in quick launch of the customer centric travel platform with lots of features, meanwhile keeping it simple". He also added, "At present we are open for online bookings, soon in a couple of months, we would be ready to take up telephone and direct bookings as well. Having studied the market potential, we are planning to open offices in multiple metropolitan cities in India and United Arab Emirates".

The portal describes itself as a "One-Stop" travel portal for cheap Airfares, best Hotel accommodations and lowest Car Rentals. Further, Vacation packages, Tour packages and Travel store will be launched soon.

The new portal might give competition to established travel portals in India such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra.com or ClearTrip, as Travelaero is different in a way that along with flight and hotel bookings it also have an extra feature of booking/renting cars. However what is available in MakeMyTrip is not there in Travelaero i.e. Bus ticket bookings. Moreover, Makemytrip and other established travel portal in India has large loyal user-base so Travelaero has to have something different which can pull those loyal customers from other portals.

The portal has very strict cancellation and refund policies. In some of the cases, the bookings are non-refundable and further, if you don't cancel in advance you may also incur a "no-show" fee in addition to any other supplier fees charged.