Gurgaon-based Travel tech startup Airblack Raises $1.5 Mn from SAIF Partners

Gurgaon-based Airblack, an end-to-end travel ecosystem for the new-age independent millennial travelers, which is yet to be launched, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from SAIF Partners, a Hong Kong-based Asia-focussed venture and growth capital fund.

The startup will utilise the seed capital for launching its product, ramping up its traveler community and hiring of a core team.

Founded this year, by Pulkit Pujara (IIT Delhi) and Videt Jaiswal (NSIT), Airblack is essentially a social-travel commerce startup that is connecting users with verified network of power travelers and travel influencers on a personal chat for exchanging recommendations around their travel plans.

Airblack, which claims to have helped more than 1000 travellers with their travel plans, leverages WhatsApp and Instagram ecosystem to connect travelers with verified network of power travelers and travel influencers.

Notably, both Pulkit and Videt are former executives at SAIF Partners. Pulkit was also AVP of Operations at online grocer Grofers. Videt has earlier worked at Boston Consulting Group and co-founded a content startup, which he exited eventually

Over one-third of US $600 billion that is spent on international travel in Asia is spent by millennials. Over two-thirds of travelers in this generation plan and book independently and Airblack is leveraging on this generational shift in the consumer travel space in Asia.

"Lot of content on platforms such as Instagram and travel blogs has made travellers more confident to travel but at the same time, it has also created a problem of information overload, that leads to anxiety and confusion. We saw there is a strong social need in travellers here to talk to other travellers before taking purchase decisions, and an aversion to talk to travel agents because they are not relatable to this audience. We are focused on creating a strong trust layer in this category,” says Videt, co-founder, Airblack.

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said in a statement, "Over $600 billion is spent on international travel in Asia, and we see India's international travel market at an inflection point already. We strongly believe that a large wave of the new consumer demand in travel will be led by people who like to have independence in planning their trips. With increasing disposable income, spend on international travel will go up. And these users will look for social validation online before deciding on a high involvement purchase like travel. We were impressed by the team's unique insights and community-driven approach to cater to this traveler."

SAIF Partners, which manages over $4 billion in assets across India & China, has earlier invested Rs 60 crore in High Street Essentials (HSE), which owns women-centric fashion brands - FabAlley and Indya, in December last year.

SAIF is also known for backing Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Meesho, ShareChat, Swiggy and Urbanclap at an early-stage. Besides MakeyMyTrip, SAIF has invested in other travel startups such as Treebo and Travel Triangle.

Trip n Howl Is A Social Networking Platform Focused On Indian Travellers

With the competitive world engulfing our life more and more, it's only natural that once in a while we tune out of it and go to new places to discover new cultures, people and, most importantly ourselves. But, what should be a rejuvenating experience turns out be a taxing one when we have to plan the vacation, right from the places to visit, to food to try, the best days to visit etc. This is where Trip n Howl, an out of the box travel social networking platform built for trip lovers comes into the picture.

What is trip n howl?

The platform allows travelers/tourists to connect with friends, other travellers, and plan their trips and share their trip moments with their friends and an online travel community. A Bangalore based startup, trip n howl is a revolutionary product of Bizy Dale Networking Services Pvt Ltd, one of the emerging business and technology startup company, which has top industry brass like Volkswagen, Hebron Group, Vision Films etc. as its clients.

How trip n howl came into existence?

Launched on 6 July 2016, the idea for the platform came to Bizy Dale's founder and CEO Satyajeet Pradhan when he and his friends used to plan for their trips through different social media sites like Facebook, Whatsapp etc. Since they were frequent trip goers, they soon realised that planning holidays through social media was a big mess as their trip-specific news would often get lost among other posts in the News Feed. He and his fellow trip goers then tried out some trip specific social networking sites but soon realised they were just like normal blogging sites and didn't offer a more frequent two-way communication. This is when he decided to start trip n howl.

Though trip n howl has a few international competitors like HelloTel, WayN and TripIt, it is the first Indian travel social networking site. The site is more than just blogging site, it offers users an interactive platform to connect, discuss, plan and cherish their trip moments with their friends, family and circles. The users can also skim through the several travel packages being offered by travel agencies or hotels based on their plan. The planner acts as a pseudo travel agent and help users get a complete understanding of distance, time and best way to travel to their selected place through the integrated Google map.

The Founder - Satyajeet P'radhan

A startup specialist, Satyajeet believes Risk taking attitude and Fear to lose are the only ingredients that a startup owner needs to become and sustain success. A post graduate in Management and an alumnus of Oxford Group of Institutions, Bangalore, he had been a performer through out his job career. He has also been awarded with Hall of Fame from Hinduja Global solutions and creation of resplendent milestones from Airtel for his remarkable performance at job. He has played a crucial part in the success of a startup which later got acquired by leading automotive portal company, Carwale.

Since the day of its launch, trip n howl has been receiving tremendous response. While the platform itself receives close to 1.5K and more page views every month, its Facebook posts also reaches more than 7000 users every week. In fact, famous personalities like Prison Break actor Steve Barnes, Dil Dosti fame Ishita Sharma, Charles Wieand, CamMiPham, Harjinder S Kukreja, John Lincoln (CEO of Ignite Visibility-the no.1 SEO company USA and UK) and more are even following trip n howl on twitter.

Future Trajectory

According to Satyajeet, this is just the starting for trip n howl. The founder already has a road map in mind to make the platform a one stop solution for travellers. The platform's mobile app is currently in progress and will be soon available to Android users.

[Top-most Image Via - Shutterstock]

Noida-Based WeTravelSolo Lets You Do 'Real Life' Social Networking Through Travel

WeTravelSolo - On reading the company's name, many might infer that I'm talking about just another travel company in the town offering travel packages for different locations. Well, those who have already inferred this, are going to be left real disappointed, as Wetravelsolo is not a quintessential Travel Company.

Noida based WeTravelSolo focuses on making its users meet like-minded people in real life, through travel. The startup claims to be India's first online Solo Traveler Community, which organizes special interest Tours for Solo Travelers. Bridging the divide between the ever increasing online and offline world of people.

In the 21st century, as we starting growing up, we slowly slowly become so much self-occupied and caught up in our own lives that the social circle of our real life starts depleting, while the online one starts increasing at a good pace. Wetravelsolo was founded with an intention of curbing this very disorder of the fast-paced lives that we live in nowadays.

Traveling is considered as one of the most effective methods to meet new people with least inhibitions. We all have the urge to travel. While in some it's clearly visible, others have successfully been able to hide the itch under some or the other worldly pleasure like money, work etc.

In this 21st century world, it's no less than a task to find like-minded people to travel with you. Even if you're successful in finding some, it's highly unlikely that they would all want to travel with you at the same time, to the same place and in the same way as you want. www.Wetravelsolo.com solves this very problem of the current generation.

While Solo Traveling might look and sound very glamorous outside, it is very boring and difficult task in real. Further, whether people agree or not, even while traveling solo, most of us are looking for ways to meet new people. So, the Wetravelsolo.com team came out with a quick and permanent solution for this travelling problem. The startup helps connect solo travelers with other solo travelers and then lets them travel solo together with each other thus taking care of your on trip Experience.

The startup aims to build a Community for the Solo Travelers. It wishes to accomplish the same by joining the three aspects of the statement, Solo, Travel and Community with the power of technology.

Their main focus is to empower every traveler by the following aspects:
a. He/She can travel solo.
b. For every Solo Traveler, there is a community which connects with you and your passion for traveling.
c. Giving hand crafted budget, experiential or backpacking trips by other influential travelers.

With such a unique concept at hand, receiving funding hasn't been that much of a task for the company. They have received Seed funding from Frontline Strategy Limited, a Mauritius based investment company and . Ccube Angels, a Singapore based angel investors community. Both the investors have acquired a minority stake in the startup.

[caption id="attachment_102501" align="alignleft" width="275"] Shefali Walia[/caption]

WeTravelSolo was founded in the year 2014 by Shefali Walia, an MBA from Amity University. She was born and bought up in Ambala and moved to Delhi in 2008 after joining Amity University for her MBA. After completing MBA, she joined New Look Skin Care (New Look Laser Clinics) in marketing department. She has handled business and marketing strategy for growth of different reputed organizations till the time she came up with the idea of WeTravelSolo.

The current figures suggest quite a promising path ahead for the company. According to the figures, the startup has already been able to be build a strong community of 30000 Solo Travelers within such a short span of time. Further, their Community Mangers are talking to close to about 100 of Solo Travelers Daily.

The startup's immediate future plans includes coming up with their own Mobile Application which can prove to be a huge game changer for them and the travelling community.

So, if you always had the urge to travel but didn't have a group of like minded individuals to travel with, you now know where to follow your traveling passion.

Noida-Based WeTravelSolo Lets You Do 'Real Life' Social Networking Through Travel

WeTravelSolo - On reading the company's name, many might infer that I'm talking about just another travel company in the town offering travel packages for different locations. Well, those who have already inferred this, are going to be left real disappointed, as Wetravelsolo is not a quintessential Travel Company.

Noida based WeTravelSolo focuses on making its users meet like-minded people in real life, through travel. The startup claims to be India's first online Solo Traveler Community, which organizes special interest Tours for Solo Travelers. Bridging the divide between the ever increasing online and offline world of people.

In the 21st century, as we starting growing up, we slowly slowly become so much self-occupied and caught up in our own lives that the social circle of our real life starts depleting, while the online one starts increasing at a good pace. Wetravelsolo was founded with an intention of curbing this very disorder of the fast-paced lives that we live in nowadays.

Traveling is considered as one of the most effective methods to meet new people with least inhibitions. We all have the urge to travel. While in some it's clearly visible, others have successfully been able to hide the itch under some or the other worldly pleasure like money, work etc.

In this 21st century world, it's no less than a task to find like-minded people to travel with you. Even if you're successful in finding some, it's highly unlikely that they would all want to travel with you at the same time, to the same place and in the same way as you want. www.Wetravelsolo.com solves this very problem of the current generation.

While Solo Traveling might look and sound very glamorous outside, it is very boring and difficult task in real. Further, whether people agree or not, even while traveling solo, most of us are looking for ways to meet new people. So, the Wetravelsolo.com team came out with a quick and permanent solution for this travelling problem. The startup helps connect solo travelers with other solo travelers and then lets them travel solo together with each other thus taking care of your on trip Experience.

The startup aims to build a Community for the Solo Travelers. It wishes to accomplish the same by joining the three aspects of the statement, Solo, Travel and Community with the power of technology.

Their main focus is to empower every traveler by the following aspects:
a. He/She can travel solo.
b. For every Solo Traveler, there is a community which connects with you and your passion for traveling.
c. Giving hand crafted budget, experiential or backpacking trips by other influential travelers.

With such a unique concept at hand, receiving funding hasn't been that much of a task for the company. They have received Seed funding from Frontline Strategy Limited, a Mauritius based investment company and . Ccube Angels, a Singapore based angel investors community. Both the investors have acquired a minority stake in the startup.

[caption id="attachment_102501" align="alignleft" width="275"] Shefali Walia[/caption]

WeTravelSolo was founded in the year 2014 by Shefali Walia, an MBA from Amity University. She was born and bought up in Ambala and moved to Delhi in 2008 after joining Amity University for her MBA. After completing MBA, she joined New Look Skin Care (New Look Laser Clinics) in marketing department. She has handled business and marketing strategy for growth of different reputed organizations till the time she came up with the idea of WeTravelSolo.

The current figures suggest quite a promising path ahead for the company. According to the figures, the startup has already been able to be build a strong community of 30000 Solo Travelers within such a short span of time. Further, their Community Mangers are talking to close to about 100 of Solo Travelers Daily.

The startup's immediate future plans includes coming up with their own Mobile Application which can prove to be a huge game changer for them and the travelling community.

So, if you always had the urge to travel but didn't have a group of like minded individuals to travel with, you now know where to follow your traveling passion.

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.

Now finance your exciting trips through Trevolta.com

Trevolta is a global crowd-funded travels website. It was founded in September 2013 by Mark Karimov, Donovan Solms and Lorette Le Roux. Based in Johannesburg- South Africa, Trevolta enables travelers to submit their extraordinary ideas for expeditions in order to raise funds for it. "We enable travelers to raise funds for their trip from the crowd and sponsors," says Mark, the CEO. All co-founders previously worked for Archer Inc. - a mobile marketing company. That's where they met, became friends and then went on their own journey of disrupting the travel and crowdfunding industry.



"Crowd-funding became such a massive industry that it started to split up into specific niches. We saw the opportunity to take the travelling niche and started working on the idea in September last year," says the Technology head, Donovan. They released their first beta version in January 2014 and already had 400,000 registered users. "We noticed that many travelers were sponsored by some great brands - that's when the idea formed properly in our heads and we just had to act on it," adds Lorette, the CCO.

Trevolta connects travelers with brands and sponsors. They go beyond crowd-funding, and build a passionate community of travelers who support each other, generate amazing content and achieve their dreams. They have partnered with South African Airways on their marketing campaign that attracted the travelers from 41 countries to participate. They are also working with another airline on their inspiring travels project that will be launched in August. Apart from this, brand such as Samsung, Hi-Tec, Hampton Inn, Hertz and others supporting their travelers.



This team of 6 enthusiastic people believes in giving 110%. They are currently in the process of setting up the Headquarters in US. "We want to be closer to the majority of our users and brands we're working with. We have a massive development roadmap and we're committed to work on the user experience, new features and new direction this business will take us to. Trevolta is a living organism and we adapt and change as we grow," adds Mark.

They are seed funded with $170k USD by a local VC with a participation of various Angels. CEO of Archer Inc. was one of their early investors. They are also looking to raise another seed round in the States.

As a message for future entrepreneurs, Mark says, "Be ready to sacrifice who you are to who you want to be. Set your priorities straight - you should find the strength to change your bad habits, kill procrastination, become more disciplined and sacrifice your social life for your goal. If your priorities are right, it won't be a problem."

So what are you waiting for? Plan an extraordinary trip and get it funded by inspired people, amazed friends and generous sponsors.

‘Padhaaro’ mhare des: Discover India with local experts

Padhaaro is a social marketplace where travellers get to meet friendly locals, helping them get a taste of unexplored gems and also promote intercultural exchange through travel. Ish Jindal and Saurabh Jain launched Padhaaro in January 2012 in Bangalore.

The idea of Padhaaro was conceived while we were traveling to Moscow in 2011 for an International Youth Forum. "Since Russia didn't seem to be as English-friendly as other European countries, even though we had tourist maps in hand, we were confused and nervous about traveling places in Moscow," says Ish, a graduate from NIT Warangal. "A lady from Moscow who was a part of our camp in the Youth Forum, came over to help us walk around important places in Moscow, explaining us the historical and current significance of important places, places to dine, shop and help us skip the places that were not important. It saved us a lot of time, money and energy,” adds Saurabh, an IIT Delhi pass out.



In the end, travel really is about experiences and the relationships you make over your journey and not about clicking pictures of monuments. These 3-4 hours with a local Russian gave the founders a perspective into how the locals live, what they do, how the cultures vary.

It helped them realize the importance of having someone "friendly" in a new place with a new language and new culture. “And it becomes much more important in a country like India where the dialect changes every 100kms,” adds Ish. Thus Padhaaro started with an idea to help people get to experience something more than fixed itineraries and packages.

Padhaaro's USP is that it connects travellers to local Indians, who can be anyone from an educated student to a working professional to housewife to a retired person who likes meeting and greeting the tourists as Friends, and not as a professional guide. The tourists get to explore and discover places which they wouldn't have visited if they were just going by the guide books or pre-planned packages. Also, the tourists can talk to these local Indians as much as they want before arriving to India - a facility not available with the travel agents. Knowing someone in a city before going to that city actually brings in a completely new touch to the visit.

They have partnered with Holidify.com and Trip38 (an app for all your travel needs). This team of 7 people plans to add features all aimed towards making traveller’s experience as informed, smooth and local as possible. They are also working a lot on the technology and want to streamline the whole process of connecting and matching people. As a message for future entrepreneurs, Ish says, "Today is brutal, tomorrow is worse and the day after tomorrow is beautiful. But most of the people will give up tomorrow night. So be patient and keep shipping."

Padhaaro.com is a part of Batch 10 of the Morpheus, the first accelerator in India to work with early stage entrepreneurs.

India's Tourism Ministry launches 360 degree street view Website with Genesys

Mumbai based Geospatial technology startup company Genesys has launched in partnership with India's Tourism Ministry a 360 degree street view website - WoNoBo.com. WoNoBo.com is an Internet service platform that combines various audio and visual location finding technologies like geospatial to give a complete overview of the location that the user is trying to find.

Wonobo lets its users find directions across several cities, search for places, even look inside thousands of businesses and interesting places. The 360 degree street view map is available 12 major cities in India - Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Agra, Bangalore, Jaipur, Pune, Surat, Goa and within few weeks it will be expanded to 54 more cities.

The site offers user generated content while offering social media capabilities such tagging of location for restaurants, petrol station, ATMs etc. and facilitating creation of local communities online by creating user generated stories, guides, walking tours which further helps other users to use them.

Users can also rate and give reviews of monuments they are seeing on Wonobo and help other people who wants to visit the places. The website tied up with tourism ministryo of India so as to promote Incredible India campaign by introducing theme-based city walks on Wonobo.com platform.

As of now the website doesn't offer any mobile application and is restricted to website only. When we went through the the website it is comparatively slow to other website in its niche and doesn't offer much guides, stories or walking tours as claimed possibly because it very new and launched recently.

According to Wonobo officials the website has taken an investment of about $35 million and two years of development in India.

India’s first SMS based Bus-ticket reservation Launched by MakeMyTrip

India’s first SMS-based bus-ticket booking service has been announced by Gurgaon based MakeMyTrip.com, a leading online travel company in India. Via this latest feature anyone with any sort of phone right from very simple mobile to smartphone can just send simple SMS to get their bus-tickets booked.

Five simple steps for SMS based Bus bookings:

1. Select Route & Date


2. Select Operator


3. Provide  Passenger Details


4. Provide Payment Details


5. SUCCESS!

To book a ticket via SMS one should send SMS as -  @mbus <From-City> <To-City> <Date-of-Travel> <No.of Passengers> to 9664896648, MakeMyTrip will then respond with choices for different operators on that day route.

Users will be required to select the operator of choice. MakeMyTrip will respond with template to provide the details and names of Travellers along with a template to make payments using IMPS. Customers then have to provide the IMPS Transaction Details (IMPS - Instant Mobile Money Transfer service).

On successful payment processing a success SMS will be sent along with an email. For several operators, the SMS itself can work as e-ticket.

IMPS Funds Transfer facility is mobile service which you can opt from you bank, you will need a 7 digit MMID (Mobile Money Identifier) number to transfer funds via IMPS. Example - for ICICI bank see here

MakemyTrip's SMS bus-ticket booking platform has been developed by txtWeb, an open platform for SMS applications, launched in India in 2011. It allows anyone with a simple mobile phone to discover and consume services on the Internet via SMS and is one of the fastest platforms to make content and services available to billions.

MakeMyTrip was also the first to develop mobile travel app for the iOS/ iPhone followed by an Android app.

Mr. Amit Somani, Chief Products Officer, MakeMyTrip said - "We targeted bus-ticket reservation for this platform since the ticket-value is lower for most first-time users to confidently experiment with the channel. Once they experience the convenience first-hand, we are confident they will continue to transact via mobile. We strongly believe that the future of e-Commerce and travel buying experience is on the ‘mobile’ and we will continue to build products with a mobile-first approach."

The MakeMyTrip website offers Bus tickets for 1300+ operators over 12,000 + routes across India including the inventory for Punbus/Punjab Roadways , GSRTC, Goa and Bihar Road Transport Corporation and Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation.

F.A.Q

How can I make a bus booking using SMS?

You need to follow below steps to make a bus booking using SMS:

1. SMS ‘@mbus’ along with details such as Origin City, Destination City, Date of Travel and Number of Passengers to 9664896648. < E.g. @mbus delhi Jaipur 01/07/2013 1 >


2. Once you send the above search details, you would receive an SMS showing top options for Bus Operators on the searched Route along with the fare details. You would need to reply with the selected Bus Operator option. < E.g. H A >


3. Once you send the selected Bus Operator option, you would be asked to confirm the booking and give the passenger name and email id. <E.g. J Rajnikant info@rajnikant.com>


4. Once you send the passenger name, you would be asked for the IMPS payment details such as Seven digit MMID number, Six digit OTP generated from Mobile Application and Mobile number registered with the Bank. <E.g. K 9453454 848529 9582495933>. You will receive a booking confirmation on your email id.

 

How do I make the payment?

Payment would be made using Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) powered by National Payment Commission of India (NPCI).

 

What is IMPS?

IMPS or Immediate Payment Service allows mobile banking users to make instant, 24 x 7, inter-bank payments to merchants using a mobile phone. IMPS enables registered users to access their bank accounts, make payments and get confirmation instantly.

 

How do I get started with IMPS?

Customer needs to be a mobile banking user of their respective bank. Following are the steps required to complete registration:

1. Register mobile number with the bank account in the respective bank. To get the list of participating banks please visit: http://www.npci.org.in/impsmerpay10.aspx

2. Get MMID: MMID or Mobile Money Identifier is 7-digit number provided by Bank to the customer. This number can uniquely identify customer’s Bank. The combination of mobile number and MMID is linked to the customer’s bank account. In case a user has multiple accounts with a bank, he can link the same mobile number with the multiple accounts and receive separate MMID for each of the accounts.

3. Get OTP: OTP or One Time Password is required for completing the transaction. This OTP can be generated from Mobile banking application provided by the Bank or through SMS/ IVR channel provided by your bank. For more details please visit: http://www.npci.org.in/impsmerpayotp.aspx

 

How can I cancel a bus booking made using SMS?

As of now, booking cancelation is available only via www.makemytrip.com.

 

Can I select the seat allotted to me?

At present, the system auto-allocates seats basis availability.

TripTern Automate Your Holiday Trip Planning

New Delhi based startup TripTern is an intelligent & automatic trip planner that ease you planning of your holiday, vacation or business trips with its engaging social travel website, it automatically prepares your itinerary/guidebook of activities for the traveler’s destination.

Users just have to select city from 32 cities to choose from, choose hotel, number of days of stay, interests and budget and it automatically prepares the most optimal & complete trip guidebook for you. It considers transit time, opening and closing hours of places while preparing itinerary. As of now it provides a list of hotels to choose from that is, you can't choose you own hotel.



The user enters a destination city and TripTern prepares a personalised travel itinerary for that destination while taking into account their trip dates, budget, optimal route information, time constraints, and method of transportation. The user is then able to add or remove activities by simply clicking on the ‘remove/add icon’. With each user choice, TripTern learns the user travel preferences and proceeds to provide relevant activities that are more likely to be of interest.

It also allows travelers to archive their most valuable memories and share it with their family and friends. One can also browse their friend's trips as well as it also allow to login via your facebook account.



The website does not book tickets or do hotel reservation but its planning do the same in future sometime soon and also on verge of developing a mobile app as well, create a local language glossary and add details about local weather and transportation to enhance personalised trip itineraries.

As of now the website has very limited number of cities/countries to choose from however the website is planing to increase the same gradually, if you are planning for trip in India it has Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai & Kolkata to choose from. TripTern launched publicly in march this year and recently got undisclosed funding from SeedStartup UAE. The company is also planning to launch mobile app.

IRCTC & MakeMyTrip are among India's Most Visited Travel Sites

No matter how buggy and balmy is Indian railways' portal IRCTC was in past year and 'best viewed in Internet Explorer 6' it still top the list of most visited portal in India in Travel category, people use to visit this official portal of Indian railways more often than any other travel portal in India.

Followed by IRCTC portal, MakeMyTrip is the second most visited travel site in India in terms of unique visitors and showed 39% growth in its unique visitors traffic from home/ office locations followed by Yatra.com as 3rd on the list as per Comscore media metrix report. The report clearly states the consumer behavior and market condition of Travel related portals and offering in India that seems to be flourishing but with due trust within consumers. Below are some interesting findings for online travel niche;

1. Traffic to the Travel category sites/portal grew to 14 million+ visitors in April, i.e. 50% growth from the previous year


2. Travel sites now attract more than one-third (37%) of India’s total Internet population


3. Indians are more cost-conscious consumer in the world and do deliberate decisions when it comes to spending online over travel sites. (as per average time spent on travel site per visit)


4. India ranked second among all countries, behind only the United Kingdom, in terms of the average time spent per visitor in the category.