Oravel was founded in 2011 by 19 year old Ritesh Agarwal, who comes from a family business background of infrastructure. The young entrepreneur been awarded by EO (Entrepreneurs Organization), NEN etc while he has also authored a best seller-Encyclopedia of Indian Engg Colleges.

We caught up with Ritesh and here’s a sneak peek into his startup’s journey this far.

To anyone who’s never come across Oravel, how would you describe it?

Oravel is an online marketplace for unique and affordable rooms. We also run OYO Inns which are economical, no-frills Inns and mid-scale Suites and we are also trying to build a chain of affordable Inns which provide luxury of three star services at prices half as hotels. When a person travels to a new place and is looking for temporary accommodation, Oravel gives exactly what is required i.e. unique places to stay.

Ritesh Agarwal

Who do you see as your target audience?

Basically our target users are the short and mid-term professional and leisure travellers, which includes SMB, who don’t want to spend much money for Spa, Gym, Club etc. All they look for is a clean, comfortable and secure room. Sometimes, corporate companies, medical tourist and event travellers also approach us.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

The market is so cliché that almost everyone is our competitor and no one is our competitor. We are different from our competitors because of the growth speed. We care about customers more than profit and try to understand what they actually want, then build the best products using the technology available to make them happy. This helps us earning in long term customers.

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?

I have faced a series of challenges in various aspects starting from incorporating the company and setting up bank accounts, as I was only 18 at that time, it even took over three months to hire the initial team. What I can further recall is hustle for solving the major problems, like strategies to be planned and products to be decided. But this was solved after receiving support from Venture Nursery.

Has Oravel got the feedback and growth you expected since launch?

It has grown more ever since the launch of product version 2.0 in August, 2013. It has over 3,500 plus listings and 100 plus inventory with OYO Inns that are majorly spread across North India.

Where do you see Oravel after five years?

Firstly, revolutionizing the accommodation process through high end technology and secondly, spreading globally and disrupting branded affordable room category and making it real and delightful. But the most important vision is to make affordable accommodations for 300 million domestic travellers easy to find.

How important is the role of Social Media for success of any startup?

In today’s world, social media is an important aspect to get more leads and conversion. Everything is getting online and in a scenario like this, social media is a major platform to market business and even improve sales. Social media is not just a place for marketing things but can also be used to build relationships.

What are your plans for promoting Oravel?

Till now we have been pure word of mouth Publicity Company but going forward we are trying to get a bit digitized. We basically reach out to more people on our social platforms and are trying to spread through- Email Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Online Advertisements etc.

What more do you wish to include to take Oravel to next level?

Right now we are soon going to launch our digital apps. And apart from this, we are also looking forward to add more services other than providing accommodation.

Ritesh is of the opinion that as a CEO, it is his job to raise enough money to keep the company scaling at full speed. Till date, the startup has raised funds from Venture Nursery led by Fame Cinemas CEO, Amit Patni and a bunch of marquee angels. Ritesh also recently bagged $100k in Thiel fellowship along with 19 other global entrepreneurs.

So the next time you are travelling and looking for a short stay accommodation that is convenient and without redundant amenities, do not forget to give Oravel a try!

The post Founded By A 19 Year Old, Oravel Offers An Alternative To Hotels For Short Stay Accommodations in India appeared first on .

Vikas Rana graduated in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 2002 and joined Trilogy where he worked for 5 years in enterprise software. Vikas joined hands with two other co-founders– Karan Nahata and Sanjay Goel and started Must See India with an initial investment of Rs. 5 lakhs each in 2008. The trio had a single goal in mind – to solve the problem of Indian travelers and be the one stop travel guide for tourists in India, covering all different aspects of travel from destination research to transportation to hotels. With more than 5 million visits per month, the startup is all set to hit revenue of Rs. 18 Crore this financial year. To explore some more in depth knowledge, we got in a conversation with Vikas:

Vikas Rana

Tell us how it all started – where did your vision for Must See India come from?

Travel sector in India is very fragmented with a lot of companies with various models. You can book some of the components of the trip, but travelers struggle with many of the items. Quality is usually poor.

We as passionate travelers ourselves understand that pain point and are working to fill this gap by providing hassle free door to door services.

How did you take your first step towards Must See India?

We started out with the goal of building the best travel information website for India. We ourselves travel quite a bit and were sort of solving the problem for ourselves. This ensured that we were able to create a website which was practical and exhaustive. Later, we expanded to helping travelers in bookings as well via online customization engine.

Karan Nahata

How does it differentiate from the rest ?

Quality and ease of use have been our biggest focuses and that’s what we think about every day. We are probably the only one among major players having a separate dedicated quality team which has absolute powers to touch base with customers at various points of their trip and get it resolved as soon as possible. It works beautifully and has given us upwards of 96% customer satisfaction.

Sanjay Goel

Could you tell us about your revenue model?

We have 3 revenue sources:

1. Package bookings

2. Online ads

3. Affiliate revenue

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?

Quality is one skill that is still not rated very high in India. I believe in delivering an excellent quality no matter how big or small the task. You need to emphasize the same with everybody you interact with, every single day. In the travel sector, there are lots of touch points with customers and it is tough getting everything done the right way from all the parties involved.

What more do you wish to include to take Must See India to the next level?

There’s a long way to go. Travel booking is still complex and we wish to simplify it further in a way where it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to book a door to door service. That’s our vision.

The startup reached half a million users within 18 months and a million users by 2010. By the year 2011, Must See India became the largest travel information website in the country. It has raised funds of Rs.1.5 crores from K Ganesh (Tutorvista founder) and is currently looking for Series A for scaling the model.

The post “Life is short and the world is full of problems. Pick one and solve it in a way everybody remembers you”- Vikas Rana, Founder & CEO, Must See India. appeared first on .

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

– St. Augustine

Do you feel like having your second honeymoon? Or that vacation with friends you always craved for but never had the time to plan one? It is time to do away with those questions with Traverik. Founded by Ashutosh Pandey, Abhishek Deo and Piyush Ranjan, Traverik helps its users to plan like a pro and connect with friends and experts alike on Facebook, Twitter etc to live out their vacations like never before!

Travel Planning made easy!

Traverik brings to you a patented technology in travel planning that lets you plan your trip, literally in seconds. It lets you go social with your travel plans on your preferred social networks with your friends and co-travelers around the world. Simple to use, the process is a breeze for all users.

One stop solution for the travelers around the world…

The work on Traverik’s platform started in March 2012 and its alpha version was first launched in June followed by the first beta version in September. It was well received by both the early adopters and tech critics/bloggers alike. After following multiple iterations, the current version was launched in February 2013.

The Travel Mavericks…

The Traveler: Ashutosh Pandey holds a B. Tech (CS) degree from NIT Allahabad and brings 3 years of experience of working in early stage startups. He founded Traverik after a weeklong vacation in Goa. At Traverik, he is responsible for the product development and overall strategy.

The Hustler: Abhishek Deo holds an MBA from IIFT Delhi and is responsible for Marketing and Business Development at Traverik.

The Planner: Piyush Ranjan holds a B. Tech (CS) from IIT Roorkee and has over 6 years of industry experience. He oversees operations and guides the direction in which Traverik is headed.

So how does it work?

You enter your desired destination & date, and the site gives you a pre-determined itinerary immediately. (The screenshot below is a three day itinerary for Paris). The itinerary can be customized completely based on the user’s needs. The suggestions tab can be used to search information categorized as hotels, restaurants, outdoors etc.

The slick interface lets a user drag and drop activities for a day, create/delete a day, add notes for a day/activity, look up recommendations for hotel, restaurant, activity, shopping and transportation for any particular day/time. One can also compare and select various transport options between two destinations along with associated cost.

Services provided by Traverik:

Currently Traverik offers Travel planning for 300 odd destinations around the world and 100 odd destinations in India, spread across themes such as Couples/Honeymooners, Family vacations, Outdoors etc.

A user can submit his/her travel plan and then Traverik comes up with more options of getting it done by tour operators in less than 48 hours.

Right now, it also offers hotel price comparisons for destinations around the world. Traverik lets you make your hotel bookings in advance and you can travel rest assured about your accommodation concerns.

Traverik allows multiple users to create trip-itineraries on a single platform. Its unique feature is ‘Social Travel Planning’ that lets you plan your trips together with friends and family. You can share your plan with anyone across the globe by just entering his/her email address and the same plan gets duplicated on their computers/smart phones etc. It is currently free for users.

 Some of its popular travel themes include:

1. Honeymoon/couples
2. Outdoor and adventure
3. Family vacations
4. Trips with friends

Limelight…

Traverik has been well received by users and reviewers alike. Traverik has been covered by Tnooz, Tech in Asia, YourStory, New Indian express etc. Recently, it was voted as the “most exciting and innovative” startup at Travelmole awards in Singapore.

The Next Level…

Traverik has been well covered by startup blogs and National dailies alike. They are reaching out to users via social media and blogs. Work is going on for the Android app which should help Traverik reach out to a wider audience and make the entire travel planning a cakewalk.

Exploring destinations become real fun with prior planning. Utilize your time in enjoying your vacations rather than trying to figure out what do and where to go. Go social with your travel plans. Break the shackles of banality and travel for travel’s sake! So let’s hit the road, climb the hills and walk by the river. Let’s be a Traverik!

The post Let’s be a Traverik! appeared first on .

Traditionally, India loves to consult for any decision with family, peers or relatives. Be its admission to a particular college or watching a movie. Online TRW helps to garner a view about a property without biases and prejudice and the reviews and advices given by real time travellers help people forming an opinion about any particular destination or hotel property. There are many travel review sites that provide information in the form of comments and reviews but the question that pops up in everybody’s mind is “Are these travel sites providing honest and accurate reviews?” Many trips are booked online based on the reviews but trippers still face grievances and are unsatisfied which tends to spoil their entire trip.

What makes TriporTrap different? TriporTrap is a hotel review site where you can read honest feedbacks, comments, and suggestions given by other travellers just like you and then decide and plan your trip. They have rated the hotels, facilities and amenities, cafeteria and restaurant facilities, housekeeping and cleanliness, parking facility and overall hospitality to ensure a satisfying holiday trip.  They also have sections related to travelling forums, discussion boards, Travelogues, Destination guides – making it a complete travelling portal where users can come and check any aspect of trip planning. Therefore the content of the website is conducive and very informative.

Many times a much awaited trip that needs a good amount of capital investment goes in vain and people are forced to think “Was it a Trip, or a Trap?”. Hence the site has come up with the name TriporTrap so that every tripper before going for a holiday can confirm his decision by going through accurate reviews and not fall into a trap.

TriporTrap call it the ‘Travel Chakra’ or the ‘Wheel of Journey’, of which ‘Read’, ‘Go’, and ‘Share’ are three vital axes.

It has been founded by Neeraj Bhatia who comes from a middle class family based out at Ludhiana, Punjab. Neeraj has been a travel enthusiastic since childhood and was a Banker for almost 6.5 years. He has done his M. Com from Amritsar and is in the finals of ICWAI.

According to the founder, India travelling space is still largely under control of Travel Agents (offline & online). TA helps marketing destinations/Properties (but with a mark-up) which travellers have to bear either in the form of marked-up charges or by under-performed services offered to them. “There is a niche segment of travellers who want to go to places in India and want to know about the destination without Photoshop images, Last minutes booking discounts, cheap deals. TriporTrap helps them to form an opinion with the real images shared by travellers and honest experiences.” says Neeraj.

On the Revenue Model

The site earns revenue through sponsored ads model in short run and later on they are planning for various OTA affiliations so that the travellers could go on those sites and compare prices about the property and could book from those sites.

Challenges Faced by TriporTrap

The primary challenges which they face are language barrier (Reviews have to be in English and of minimum 300 words), laziness or non-responsive nature of people to write a Review, lack of confidence in writing, no incentive, not too much tech friendliness, privacy concern, people are not acquainted to giving feedback on-line.

However, Neeraj feels reaching to Tier I & II cities will not be so tough as compared to rest of India.

Plans on promoting TriporTrap

They have restrained from any kind of viral campaign or PR. They claim that they are building a Brand and so want to use the website platform in a mature way. They planned it not like a movie release which is loaded with information but they wish to promote it through positive word of mouth and Social Media campaigns (on Facebook and Twitter). They will try to reach out the mass audience once they are able to put across their brand.

For booking etc., they have a tie-up with Travelguru.com, where people, based upon their choice can be redirected and can book the hotels, resorts or any property.

Taking it to the Next Level

Travelling portal has to be very contemporary and TriporTrap is working on various aspects of expansion so as to provide enrichment to the experience of the end users. They are working on Mobile apps, Enterprise solutions (Giving Property owners to access and manage their property page), Distance calculators and Destination guide.

Neeraj advises entrepreneurs to follow their dreams. He believes dreams give you fuel and even it takes a lot of tries, if you’re passionate and have conviction; you can win this. Remember, nobody understands your prototype, so listen to yourself first.

Do visit their site! TriporTrap

The post TriporTrap.com – a Hotel Review site that helps Trippers to Experience the Best! appeared first on .

– Farrah Gray

We often go through entrepreneurial stories, where the founder always had a burning desire to establish his own business. However, the story of redBus.in is quite distinct from a typical clichéd success story. Three engineer friends who studied together at the BITS and the unavailability of a bus ticket are the reasons behind its existence.

redBus.in is the brainchild of Phanindra Sama, who prefers to call himself an ‘accidental’ entrepreneur. Sama aspired to be an electronics engineer and was happy working with Texas Instruments in Bangalore after passing out from BITS. He was pretty much content with life until he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. The idea of starting a bus ticketing service was visualized by him when he failed to get a bus ticket from Bangalore to Hyderabad during the Diwali weekend in the year 2005. He decided to explore the entire bus ticketing process and to his surprise figured out many drawbacks in the system.

First of all, the agents did not have contact with all the operators. When a customer approaches an agent to book a ticket, the agent calls up the operator to find out about the availability of bus tickets.  The operator then looks at the chart and tells him about the number of vacant seats available. A bus operator can have only limited agents since he has to contact them via phone. The agents also have a limited number of operators to work with. The fare prices for the customer were not constant and kept fluctuating. One of the biggest problems was availability of return tickets. Sama felt soft wares and technology were the the ultimate tools to solve these problems.

That same weekend he wrote a letter to his friends, mentioning the problem and also his approach towards solving it. At the initial stage the idea was to create a software that would be sold to bus operators but as time passed by, it turned into a business proposition.

After the prototype was ready, they went to bus operators and tried selling it to them. However they were nothing more than salespeople for the operators and were not willing to use it even free of cost. When the situation was turning dismaying, they heard of TiE, Bangalore and proposed their business plan to them. TiE gave them three mentors who advised them on how to start a business of their own. They were given assignments every week to gather information about the number of buses, the number of routes, the average price of a bus ticket, how many people travel by bus, the type of customers, how much commission a bus operator pays to an agent and so on. Such a market survey aided them in getting a clear picture of how things worked in the industry and its Modus operandi.

redBus.in was started in August 2006 with Rs.5  lakhs which was the savings of the three friends- Sama, Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri. The word Red was chosen because they believed marketing becomes easy if you have a color associated with your brand and they wanted the name of the company to be short and precise.

Phanindra Sama, CEO and Founder of redBus.in

Life after redBus was very challenging and the hardest part was persuading the bus operators. After slaving for days, an operator agreed to give Redbus five seats and promised to give them more if they sold all five in one week. They told all their friends and colleagues about it and asked them to buy bus tickets from them. They even requested one of their friends to write about them on the discussion board at Infosys.

On the 22nd of August, they sold their first seat. A lady working at Infosys booked a ticket to go to Tirupati. They were so tense that they went to the bus station and waited till she boarded the bus. They sold all the remaining tickets in five days and went back to the operator. Soon they started adding more operators to their inventory. In order to get customers, they used to stand outside IT companies, wait for the employees to come out for lunch and hand over their redBus cards to them.

TiE selected Redbus for mentoring which became news and Venture capitalists showed a willingness to invest in their idea. At the beginning, they were of the opinion that they need Rs. 30 lakhs for developing the idea but after spending several hours with the venture capitalists they realized they needed at least Rs. 3 crore to take their business to the next level.

Today redBus sells about 228,000 seats per day and more than a million tickets per month. It has over 600 employees and the gross value of transactions on redBus last year was Rs. 600 crore. Since the company works on commission revenue on successful transactions, the net revenue is lower and in the year 2011-2012 it was about Rs.33 crore.

The company redBus was recently sold to the Ibibo group, a subsidiary of the Naspers group of South Africa in the month of June. Ibibo has added redBus to its other travel assets like Goibibo.com, the online travel aggregator and TravelBoutiqueOnline. This acquisition is considered to be the biggest overseas strategic acquisition of an Indian internet website. The last big overseas acquisition took place almost a decade ago, when Baazee.com was sold to Ebay in a $55 million deal in 2004.

Even after its acquisition, redBus will operate as an independent entity and Sama will continue to play his previous role of a CEO. The management team and the employees are also staying in place. According to Sama, there have been no changes in his life and the deal was very attractive as there is no risk to redBus and the company will not face the problems of integration.

The post Unavailability of a Bus Ticket Led to the creation of Redbus.in, India’s largest Bus Ticketing Company! appeared first on .