Travel and Tourism industry plays an essential role in the economy of Philippines. According to the report, the country generated an estimated earnings of Php 21.94 billion from tourism activities in the month of January this year. It is predicted that the direct contribution of this sector will reach to Php 964 billion by 2025.

While the tourism sector of Philippines is booming at an attractive pace, many new businesses have successfully established themselves in the market. We have listed few travel startups below that might interest you:

#1 Partyphile

Founded by Ron Baetiong last year, Partyphile is one of the easiest ways to get in the best parties, events and nightlife hotspots of the city. It allows people in Asia to discover and get access to the best clubs, bars and events. The users can book tables seamlessly, get on the guest list of clubs to waive the cover charge and skip the regular queues. Travellers who love to party or socialise extensively in new cities and towns should give this app a shot!

Languages: English

#2 Tripid

Launched by Michael Ngo Dee in 2012, Tripid is a ride-sharing app that connects drivers and travellers moving in the same direction. It is an open car-pooling system which enables trippers to cut down their travel expenses. Users can either search for trips or post their own. They can even chat privately with their trip buddies. After the completion of the journey, travellers need to pay the drivers using Tripid Credits.

Language: English

#3 Cape

Planned to be launched this year, Cape will be a social travel booking app for standby flight tickets. To elaborate, travellers will get a chance to reserve standby seats at lower prices. It is a perfect medium for travelling leisurely, wandering, visiting family and friends and taking mini-vacations. This service will be made available for both local and international flight travellers.

Language: English

#4 FlipTrip

Founded by April Cuenca and Jackie Yap in 2014, FlipTrip is an online platform that simplifies travel planning and the booking process. Travellers can find their next travel destination, pick tour activities, accommodation and transportation with absolute ease. Moreover, they can get in touch with the locals to obtain insider’s information about the cities or towns.

Language: English

#5 helloZIG

Launched by Aya Palmera- Montebon last year, helloZIG is a local search app that lets users look for professionals or services based on current location. It makes all emergency numbers such as police and ambulance available even while offline. It has a reliable list with updated, checked and verified contact numbers. Travellers can depend on this app whenever they need any sort of help or assistance.

Language: English

#6 looloo

Founded by Odell Ramirez in 2012, looloo helps travellers discover the best restaurants, hotels, spas, nightlife spots and attractive destinations in Philippines. The app can be useful for finding out important details like opening hours, closing hours, viewing the menu etc. It has a collection of customer reviews that are accessible to make better travel plans anytime.

Language: English

#7 OutPax

Launched by Eric Tuñacao last year, OutPax is an online application for travellers and adventurers. It allows vendors to put down and showcase their travel offerings. The vendors can even invite people to experience the activities through it. Trippers can get in touch with people who are passionate about exploration, travel and adventure. It covers outdoor activities from family picnics to daring skydiving events.

Language: English

#8 HomeDiner

Founded by Mark Leoceli Espartero, Charis Barbosa, Jonathan Boto and Rustjohn Balagulan last year, HomeDiner allows users to order, reserve and deliver food from restaurants. Trippers can go through the menu of the restaurants and order food as per their choice. Later if they want to cancel their order, they can do it by doing just a few clicks. Travellers can use this app if they do not wish to go out but enjoy the comfort of their accommodation.

Language: English

#9 Tripsiders

Launched by Gerold Mercadero and Rachel Jaro in 2011, Tripsiders is an online platform where trippers can plan and share travel stories and itineraries. It lists many popular Indonesian destinations like Aklan, Bohol, Cebu and Laguna. Beyond this, the users can easily interact with the community of wanderers by sharing travel highlights, travel tips and insider information.

Language: English

#10 FoodEagle

Founded by Jon Fry and Scott Underhill last year, FoodEagle is often termed as ‘Tinder for food’. If travellers have just no idea of what to eat, FoodEagle’s image section can help them find the perfect food item as per their choice. Users can also find out about the nearby restaurants based on their current location and check out other essential details relating to them.

Language: English

If you know of any other travel startup of Philippines that can be included in our list, do let us know about it!  

Also Read: Travel Sprint: Our pick of Malaysia’s 10 Coolest travel startups

The post Travel Sprint: Our pick of Philippines’ 10 coolest travel startups appeared first on TravHQ.

Women are an essential element of society. They play a significant role in the upliftment of the human community and civilisation. Acknowledging their efforts in political and social fields over the years, International Women’s Day was first celebrated as a Socialist political event in 1909.

Celebrating the beauty and elegance of womanhood, International Women’s Day 2016 was celebrated in an awe-inspiring manner. Many travel brands launched woman-centric campaigns and activities that successfully grabbed the attention of the people not only nation-wide but world-wide. We have listed few of them below:

1) Probably, the world’s longest all-women flight ever!

To do a landmark historic event, Air India commendably ran a 17-hour flight that covered more than 8,000 miles.  According to the airline, this was world’s longest all-women operated and supported flight ever! It indicated the fact that every male dominated function can be carried out by women safely and efficiently.

2) #WomenWhoMakeUsFly

Vistara, an Indian airline based in Gurgaon, launched a social media campaign #WomenWhoMakeUsFly to showcase the extraordinary role their women employees play to make the airline fly. These employees have helped the brand scale new heights in reliability and service excellence within a very short time period. As a tribute, Vistara display picture on its Facebook page depicted many female employees. To commemorate further, it even operated all-women crew flights on the domestic network.

3) #GetawayGoddess

Cox and Kings’, a travel company headquartered in the UK, started #GetawayGoddess campaign on Twitter asking females about various reasons that stop them from exploring the world. Interestingly, it reached 30 lakh people generating over three crore impressions in just four hours. There were many destinations listed which displayed women-only tours. Cox and Kings’ also focused on the safety and comfort of the female travellers.

4) Jet Viva – Celebrating Womanhood

As a part of International Women’s Day 2016, Jet Airways has supported four non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on a range of women issues. It is carrying out its unique in-flight fundraising drive between 7^th March-21^st March on all domestic flights. Beyond this, Jet Airways flights 9W301/9W302 between Mumbai and Delhi and 9W361/9W362 between Delhi and Mumbai will be serviced by all-women cockpit and cabin crew. It also gave special discounts to women travellers.

5) #TravelWithHer

Stayzilla, an online platform that provides convenient and personalised stay experiences with a coverage of 30,000+ properties in 4000+ locations, initiated a travel campaign named ‘#TravelWithHer’. Females were asked to write travel stories about women who inspire them and how proud they feel being a woman. Stayzilla announced that the most popular stories will feature on its website.

Do let us know which one’s your favourite amongst the campaigns above.

The post Here’s how the travel industry celebrated Woman’s Day 2016 appeared first on TravHQ.

This is an interesting news for tech-savvy people, especially travellers! Google Photos – a photograph and video sharing and storage service by Google – has rolled out a notable update on iOS. The iPhone and iPad application now supports Live Photos.

With this interesting feature, the users will be able to store, view and organise their Live Photos in the mobile app, even after they have been removed from the Camera Roll. Prior to this, the animated photo format was introduced with iOS 9 and the newer iPhone 6s and 6s Plus devices.

How does it work?

After Live Photos have been uploaded to Google Photos on iOS, the users can Force Touch on the image in order to see them animate. The images are also designated with the “Live Photo” icon at the top of the screen, so the users can know they are not just a static image. Having said that, if you download the Live Photo from Google Photos back to your device, the content will no longer remain animated. However, if the backed-up Live Photo is saved to the Camera Roll, it will then be playable in the Apple Photos App.

What’s in it for travellers and travel marketers?

Travellers can use the updated Google Photos to a whole new level altogether. While exploring the different international and domestic destinations, trippers can capture the beautiful travel moments in an easier manner. Movements in the landscape, behaviour of animals and expressions of people can be recorded conveniently. This content format is particularly helpful to people who are in two minds about taking a video or photo. Live Photos are something between automatic GIFs and short video clips.  Since they are usually small in size, travellers won’t have to bother about the memory space of their mobile phones. This encourages shareability of the content with travel companions too. Beyond that, travel brands can use Live Photos for marketing the popular destinations.They can experiment further with this feature.

Google Photos is not the first third-party service to add the technical support for Apple’s specialised image format. Social Media platforms like Facebook and Tumblr back this form of content too. How will Google Photos fare against these brands is yet to be seen.

Download Google Photos iOS app here.

Source: TechCrunch

The post Travellers can now capture Live Photos via Google Photos’ iOS app! appeared first on TravHQ.

In the last few years, there has been a growth in the number of female travellers. These trippers are ready to explore the different corners of the country and world – sometimes with their family/friends or at times on their own. According to the report, woman solo travel in India has seen a growth of 29% last year, as compared to 18% of 2014.

Fortunately, age is no longer considered a stigma – one of the many reasons why Indian women of all ages are feeling more confident about travelling alone. The number of women travellers has increased in the international spectrum too. Celebrating the beauty of women and their ardent love for travel, on this Women’s Day, we have listed few mobile apps below that might be highly relevant to them:

 #1 bSafe

Safety of travellers, especially women travellers is really important to us. bSafe is an ultimate safety app with outstanding features. It has multiple options for both everyday safety and real emergencies. Users can set up their own network of friends, family and co-workers. Consequently, they can share locations to find each other seamlessly. If female travellers sense danger while walking at night, they can easily ask friends to walk with them via Follow Me’s live GPS trace. There’s a ‘Time Mode’ feature to programme an alarm that will trigger automatically if the travellers have not checked in at the scheduled time. It also has a ‘Fake Call’ option that might be necessary to move out of unfavourable situations.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

#2 HERE Maps

This mobile app is an ideal companion for all forms of journeys! It is a navigation system which also displays real-time traffic, turn-by-turn voice guidance, speed limit information and a simple directions list. Female travellers can use this tool to hop on the buses or take trains, with public routes for over 1,200 cities around the world. It can run smoothly on the phone without the use of the internet. Users can download maps for over 100 countries by paying no amount at all.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

#3 Swachh Bharat Toilet Locator

Swachh Bharat Toilet Locator is a mobile app that can be used by female travellers to reach the nearest restrooms with the support of navigation system. It lists washrooms that are generally free to use in the public spaces. The app supports public ratings based on hygiene, infrastructure and safety thus allowing users to know more about the conditions of washrooms. It also provides a user-friendly platform for giving feedbacks and submitting new entries.

Available on Google Play Store

#4 Hostelworld

Many trippers travel on a limited budget. Keeping this in mind, we introduce you to Hostelworld – a mobile app that allows people to book beds or rooms in any of 33,000 hostels, hotels and motels around the globe. Booking is absolutely free of cost and there are just no hidden costs involved. It covers interesting destinations from USA, Europe, Australia, South America and Southeast Asia. Like other trippers, female solo travellers can go through the reviews of each accommodation and choose the place safest and most convenient to them. It has 3.5 million customer reviews.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes 

#5 Google Translate

Foreign languages can act as barriers for travellers. Understanding this, we have included the highly popular Google Translate app in our list. Google Translate can be a very helpful app for solo travellers. These trippers won’t have to depend on strangers for translating their content. Users can type and translate 90 languages with just a few clicks. Also, phone’s camera can be used to translate text instantly in 26 languages. Travellers can take advantage of this unique feature to translate the content of menu cards or hotel brochures. For the convenience of these travellers, there is a star and save option in the mobile app that can be used for future reference anytime.  It supports translation between Arabic, Afrikaans, Chinese, English, Gujarati etc.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple iTunes

If you know of any good apps that we can add to this list, do let us know about it!

The post Women’s Day Exclusive: 5 essential apps for solo female travellers appeared first on TravHQ.

With the increased internet penetration and exponential growth of businesses in India, innumerable digital marketing organisations have come into existence in the past few years. Instead, as per the article, the digital marketing industry is booming high with 40% growth rate. Consequently, the number of online marketers for destinations has increased too.

Formulating a good marketing strategy for tourism is vital for online travel marketers. It plays an important role in coordinating business activities, eliminating interferences and maximising profits. We have listed few key points below that might be highly useful for digital travel marketers.

Tapping into the needs and emotions of customers

Online travel marketers must keep in mind that creating an immediate need for destinations is a crucial element. There are different methods of carrying out this process. Online marketers can post attractive photos of cuisines, off-beat spots, flora and fauna related to the place. Interesting facts can be revealed too. This will grab the attention of trippers within seconds and bring higher engagement in the online medium. Beyond this, the format of the content should be gauged. For example, online videos might not be the best option in India as internet speed is drastically slow here. More innovative forms of content like gif animations and cinema graphs can be considered. Another aspect that is deemed necessary is bringing a sense of emotional connection between the people and the products/services. If a photo of a destination reminds the trippers of a particular travel experience, the travel brand can perform exceptionally well in the market space.

Focusing on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter

Social Media platforms can be extremely useful for online travel marketers. Beyond attracting tourists, it assists the trippers in shaping their travel plans and decisions. Timely and positive feedbacks on people’s reviews can encourage travellers to re-visit the destinations. Online reviews, Facebook comments and Twitter posts can impact a destination’s attendance. One exemplary social media campaign has been #MeetSouthAfrica. It had produced 9,000+ tweets, 77.8 million tweet impressions and 1,059 photos on Instagram. Needless to say, it had grabbed the attention of many people worldwide and promoted South Africa in a major way.

Relevance of SEO

Travel SEO is visibly different from the regular SEO. People while making travel plans usually do lot of research online. As per the reports, they search queries usually consist of long tail keywords. For example, instead of just typing ‘holiday’, they might look for ‘safest family beach holiday’ or ‘best places to visit in South Africa’. For good SEO, content should be developed in a similar manner. Also, linking few parts of it from reliable and popular websites can put the content in a more noticeable position in the search engines. Such tricks should be considered while designing the marketing strategy.

Listing in popular websites

Online travel marketers can enlist their products or services in sites like TripAdvisor, Hipmunk, Flightfox and BookingBuddy. Similarly, they can associate with travel bloggers to increase the visibility. Getting their content across through blogs can be a good marketing technique. Hence, the brands can easily expand their businesses, achieve maximum exposure and obtain monetary benefits later.

Travel PPC should not be set and forget

Travel industry is third largest in paid searches. Some easy tricks can help your Adwords campaign outperform and get worthy return. AdWords should never be set it and forget it, but with travel, pausing seasonably irrelevant campaigns, making adjustments to ad text, and monitoring locations, time and hour of the day are even more critical to avoid wasting large sums of marketing spend. Not only searches but in order to promote your destination, marketers must put their sweat and tears into display advertising. Use of captivating visuals with some compelling strategies like re marketing can do wonders in small budgets.

These tips should help all the Destination Marketers frame their digital strategy. If you have any additional points to add on, do let us know!

The post Destination Marketers: 5 interesting tips for framing the right digital strategy appeared first on TravHQ.

Ixigo, a travel company headquartered in Gurgaon – India, has recently announced the launch of ixibook. This platform will allow travellers to make bookings for flights and hotels within the mobile app without being redirected to a third-party website or app. To make this a reality, the company has collaborated with the leading brands like Cleartrip and OYO Rooms.

ixibook is already operational at this moment. It enables the users of the mobile application to book flights and tickets in just one click. The idea behind creating this platform was not only to enable direct in-app booking but also to save a traveller’s time by diminishing the conversation funnel. For the convenience of the travellers, ixibook stores the user’s information. This data will be protected with 256-bit security. All subsequent financial transactions can be done without inserting the same information time and again. Also, post-booking customer support will be handled directly by the respective partner.

Commenting on the launch, Aloke Bajpai, co-­founder & CEO of ixigo, said:

“This is a first of its kind innovation in the Indian travel market, and we have chosen to work with the industry’s best for our initial launch. With ixibook, we will deliver a much smoother customer experience for ixigoers and enhance conversions for our partners by allowing users to book with them natively within our app. We expect to move over 30% of our flight and hotel bookings to ixibook within the next few months, as well as add more partners to ixibook later this year.”

Sharing his perspective, Stuart Crighton, CEO of Cleartrip, quoted:

“We’re excited to partner with ixigo on this first-of-its-kind paradigm where an online travel agency and meta-search collaborate closely to create a better user experience, something that we both value immensely.”

Ritesh Agarwal, CEO of OYO Rooms, added:

“ixigo possesses deep insights into traveller-behaviour and a rich content focus. Through this collaboration, their audience will find value in our offerings and we will be able to expand our reach to engage leisure travel enthusiasts.”

By this development, ixigo is attempting to become a more vertically integrated player. With the launch of this product, it might be successful in increasing its customer base and obtaining higher profits.

Currently, ixibook is available via Google Play Store only.

The post ixigo launches ixibook, partners with Cleartrip and OYO Rooms appeared first on TravHQ.

With the motive to expand its business and increase its customer base, TravelKhana, an online food delivery service for railway passengers, will now cater to bus travellers and suburban railway networks in Delhi and Mumbai.

As per their business plan, the company will supply food to long-distance bus passengers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Vijaywada, Pune and Mumbai along with the metro network in Delhi and suburban network in Mumbai.

According to the article, Pushpinder Singh, co-founder and CEO of TravelKhana, quoted:

“We have seen places where people want to buy their meal when they get down from the train in suburban stations or during long distance journeys by bus, but good quality food is limited. We want to address this problem so that they can order their meals and get them.”

TravelKhana recently tied up with IRCTC for e-catering to provide food for passengers at rail premises. Its services will soon be available on IRCTC’s e-catering website as the integration is underway at this moment.

Currently, the four-year-old startup caters to 160 railway stations in India, serving 3,000 to 4,000 meals a day. Travelkhana expects to reach 12,000-15,000 daily meals by the end of this year.  By 2020, it aims to touch 1,50,000 daily meals. Elaborating on the same, Pushpinder Singh, stated:

“The volume can be achieved through the IRCTC tie-up, by adding new restaurant partners, branding across different railway properties and through marketing.”

To further attract customers, Travelkhana has revamped its technology platform and standardised its delivery model and prices across various restaurant partners.

With such business associations and extensive remodelling, Travelkhana is attempting to turn into a bigger player in the Indian travel industry.

Also Read: How IRCTC tied up with Indian and International brands to assist the travellers

The post TravelKhana expands its business in India, caters to bus travellers now! appeared first on TravHQ.

India has witnessed a sudden boom in travel startups for the past few years. Few factors that can be stated for this rapid development are the wide availability of internet, smartphone penetration and the growing number of travellers. According to the website, 20 bike taxi startups have been launched in India over the last two years. Some of them are Baxi of Gurgaon and Rapido of Bengaluru. Uber, a leading taxi dispatch company headquartered in California, has recently entered this market space. With the aim to further increase its customer base and obtain monetary benefits, Uber will launch its ultra-economical bike taxi service called ‘UberMOTO’ on a pilot basis today in Bengaluru.

The fares of Uber’s bike taxi service will be as low as Rs 3/km. This makes it the cheapest offering by Uber so far. The brand will charge 20% commission on each ride and provide the travellers an option to pay with either cash or credit. Later, they will be given an electronic receipt too. For the safety of the trippers, the service will include GPS tracking, two-way feedback and options to share noteworthy trip details with family and friends. The drivers are verified through their standard procedure similar to all the other cab drivers that work with Uber. The drivers will carry a helmet for the passengers they pick up.

This offering by Uber might be quite profitable for Karnataka Transport Department. Bengaluru has 3.8 million two-wheelers compared to 1.1 million cars as of March 2015. If UberMOTO turns successful, it might lead to a huge jump in the number of riding options for commuters and more revenue for Uber. This might help the city eliminate traffic congestion and pollution.

Sharing a different perspective altogether, according to the report, Neel Ratan, executive director at audit and consultancy firm PwC, quoted:

“The option may not be completely infeasible for women commuters as they can be opt for women riders on two-wheelers.”

UberMOTO will have to face a stiff competition from other bike taxi brands that are attempting to expand their businesses in differ Indian cities.

Uber is a popular brand worldwide and its bike taxi service in the Indian travel market space might be quite beneficial for the company as India is one of the world’s biggest market for two-wheelers. Although predictive to a certain extent, how will if fare in the coming time is yet to be seen.

Also Read: Uber launches UberMoto bike taxi service in Bangkok

The post After Bangkok, Uber launches UberMOTO for the first time in India today! appeared first on TravHQ.

DriveU, a platform that provides unique car driver services in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, has recently raised seed round of investment from Unitus Seed Fund. The financial details of this business transaction have not been revealed by either of the parties yet.

Interested travellers can easily book the nearest DriveU driver and can also track while the driver is on route to the user’s pickup location. When the booking is confirmed, all essential information such as driver’s name, picture, rating, phone number, location, distance from the traveller’s pick-up point and estimated travel expenses will be displayed. For the convenience of the trippers, the app displays feedback system too. It supports three languages i.e. Hindi, English and Kannada. DriveU charges by the minutes starting at Rs99/hr.

The business model of DriveU is quite different from the popular cab-hailing services like Ola and Uber. Through this service, travellers can continue using their private cars rather than hiring cabs from time to time.

Founded by Ramprasad (Rahm) Shastry, Ashok Shastry and Amulmeet Singh Chadha last year, the startup is owned and operated successfully by Humble Mobile Solutions Pvt Ltd. The company claims to have served over 6,000 customers with a larger fraction being females.

This investment by Unitus Seed Fund will help catalyse the growth of DriveU to further expand its business and enlist more drivers.

Available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store

Source: iamwire

The post DriverU raises funds from Unitus Seed Fund appeared first on TravHQ.

The travel and tourism industry plays an important role in the economy of Hong Kong. In 2014, 60 million tourists visited this country. However, based on official numbers, there was 2.5% drop in the number of registered arrivals last year. The same trend might continue in this year as well.

According to the report, during the Lunar New Year holiday, the amount of mainland Chinese visitors dropped by 11.7% year-on-year while the neighbouring region Macao reported a 4.7% rise, compared to the holiday last year. One of the main contributory factors that can be attributed to the decline in the number of travellers are the intense riots that had adversely affected this region during the Lunar New Year period. Due to this turmoil, there was a reduction in the number of Chinese inbound tourists.

The government will allocate more than $200 million towards HKTB to uplift its marketing efforts. This will be a significant boost from lat year’s $80 million.

Innumerable medium and long-term initiatives will be implemented to further boost Hong Kong’s tourism industry. This includes waiving license fees for several of the industry’s key players and hosting important and exciting international events. Also, the government aims to open new markets, concentrate heavily on overseas promotions and encourage inbound activity by showcasing unique tourism attractions such as MICE tourism and fly cruise tours etc.

As per the long-term plans, infrastructure will be updated in Disneyland – one of Hong Kong’s key attractions. Disneyland might face cut-throat competition from Disney’s first resort in mainland China. This resort is expected to be bigger, more modern and, most importantly, much cheaper.

The huge investment from Hong Kong’s government will be useful for the travel and tourism industry as it aims to attract international tourists from across the globe.

Also Read: Visit Smart City, Hong Kong: Traveller’s ultimate destination for futuristic world

The post Hong Kong’s tourism industry to receive $200 million appeared first on TravHQ.