Naspers backed B2B travel portal Travel Boutique Online (TBO) has partnered with Fxkart.com to enable the agents of TBO to easily book foreign exchange seamlessly. Fxkart.com is a marketplace of foreign exchange dealers that allows for travellers to book forex easily. With multiple forex dealers competing against each other, travellers get the best deals without any hassles. TBO has 19,000 travel agents on the platform and they will be able to gain from this partnership.

Mr. Ankush Nijhawan, Co-Founder, TBO Group said, “Fxkart.com is one of the most promising startups in the fin-tech sector. With foreign exchange being one of the biggest pain points for the travel agent, this would be a shot in the arm to seamlessly book forex on the portal and servicing the customer at the lowest rates.”

Despite the increase in size of online travel market in India, the offline players continue to hold a strong share of the huge market. This offline market is driven by travel agents and platforms like TBO allow them to offer competitive prices to the travellers. With this partnership in place, the job of these travel agents will be simplified resulting in better experience for their customers.

On this occasion, Mr. Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO Fxkart.com said, “We are happy to be on the platform as it gives us an instant reach to service travel agents who trust TBO across India with the help of technology.”

Fxkart was the winner of our very first Travel Startup Knockdown hosted in association with OTM Mumbai. Startup Knockdown is back, this time with lot more opportunities for the participants. Find more details at startupknockdown.travhq.com.

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The very first Travel Startup Knockdown was concluded recently in association with OTM Mumbai, India’s largest travel trade show and the response was phenomenal. We received entries from some really interesting startups that hold great potential. The panel of judges, which featured Siddharth Dabhade, Head of travel business, Google India, Sanjiv Swarup, Venture Capitalist, Sanjiv Agarwal, Founder & CEO, Fairfest Media and Ashish Pai, Corporate Strategy, Cox & Kings, shared the opinion that platforms like Startup Knockdown are a great way to give the innovators an opportunity to reach more audience.

Fxkart, winner of Judges’ Choice Award at Startup Knockdown Mumbai

After comparing the startups that pitched at the event, the judges picked Fxkart as the winner of first Travel Startup Knockdown. The startup addresses one of the biggest hassles travellers face when they are planning to travel internationally i.e. forex. There are vendors that charge huge commissions on your currency and there are vendors that don’t give the impression of authenticity. Fxkart saves you from the trouble of filtering through such vendors and offers you the best exchange rates. On top of that, you can do all that from the comfort of your home and get the currency delivered to your doorstep.

Sharing his experience on the same, Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO, Fxkart said, “It gave us a new perspective and also validating our idea in terms of other products in the travel startup space. A lot of times startups assume a lot of things and think they are building something path breaking but unless there is validation from the industry it doesn’t make any sense. For us, winning the StartupKnockdown was a stepping stone and gives us the energy and zeal to keep doing the good work”

Tramily was the second startup that got highlighted. It won the people’s choice award at the event. Travel agents, while putting together the itineraries for their clients, need to get good hotel deals. Tramily allows them to find the best hotel deals to include in the itineraries. They can post their requirements for room nights and hotels can respond with the best deals if they fit the bill. Also the hotels can post their deals and the agents can choose while putting together a package. It is also available through a mobile app.

Tramily, winner of People’s Choice Award at Startup Knockdown Mumbai

There were many other promising startups that pitched at the event. Putting together the plans for a group trip is a tough job and MyTripKarma plans to simplify that by allowing multiple travellers to book together in one place. iManageMyHotel offers centralised property management solutions for hotels so that they don’t have to invest in developing their own such solutions. inTRANSIT is a social platform that enhances your travel experience by adding the option to communicate with fellow passengers at airports. EasyGroupBook simplifies lodging for large events and GoMowgli takes more control over activities and experiences to offer a consistent travel experience.

Here are some more images from the event:

We will be hosting the second edition of Travel Startup Knockdown next month and are inviting applications from early stage travel startups for the same. You can find more details about the event here.

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Globally the phenomenon of travel startups has been on the rise and via our platform, we have been making an ardent effort to recognise the problem solvers across the travel & tourism industry. According to a research by Phocuswright, about 1000 travel startups were launched between the period of 2005 and 2014, attracting about $12.2 billion in investments. Many of these travel startups have become global success stories inspiring more entrepreneurs in the travel segment to think of newer ideas.

While bidding adieu to 2015, we announced #StartupKnockdown our flagship initiative to recognise Travel Startups across various clusters & cities in India. The first leg of #StartupKnockdown which is scheduled to take place in Mumbai on 19th February 2016  has witnessed an overwhelming response from many travel startups. After an intensive round of screening all entries, we are glad to announce the list of finalists for the Mumbai session.

These finalists will battle it out in front of our panel of judges to win the coveted award at TechForum @OTM, Mumbai.

Fxkart

Fxkart is the first platform of its kind that allows international travellers to exchange currency hassle free. Travellers can post their requirements, get quotes from multiple verified dealers and get the exchange at the doorstep.

MyTripKarma

MyTripKarma is a startup that tries to address the requirements of travellers at multiple stages. It allows multiple travellers to collaborate for one trip, discuss the plans and then buy as one instead of multiple transactions.

Tramily

Tramily is a marketplace for hoteliers and travel agents. It tries to increase the personal connection of the agents and hoteliers which they can leverage to each other’s advantage. Agents can post their requirements for hotels or find deals to put together their packages using the mobile app.

GoMowgli

GoMowgli takes an interesting approach to the conventional local tours. Instead of just aggregating tours and activities from different providers, they are taking more control over the same to offer a consistent travel experience.

EasyGroupBook

We often have to take the offline route when it comes to booking for events or for large groups. However EasyGroupBook plans to change that. It simplifies the lodging for event organisers by offering negotiated rates for the hotels available for the event through a cloud based solution.

inTRANSIT by Nanak Technologies 

inTRANSIT is a social networking platform that enhances one’s travel experience by improving both the means of communication with other travellers and the quality of time spent at airports. In the inTRANSIT Lounge, travellers can meet like-minded individuals at airports with absolute ease. It offers duty-free deals and promotions to expand its customer base.

iManageMyHotel

The small hotels often rely on old school property management methods as investing into developing software solutions is costly. iManageMyHotel provides a centralised property management system which allows hoteliers to manage their properties from cloud.

If you couldn’t send in your pitch for this edition of Travel Startup Knockdown, you can be a part of the next event in Delhi. Find more details here.

Update (Feb 16, 2016): We have been informed by the OTM team that TripHobo has opted out of participation in #StartupKnockdown Mumbai.

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Building a successful business isn’t easy. The road from having the idea to actually taking the plunge is tough and the journey beyond that is even tougher. Despite that, we learn about a large number of startups everyday, especially in the fast growing travel space. There are many entrepreneurs who choose to address the pain point of masses. While there are many unsuccessful entrepreneurs, there are some who set examples for others. They make mistakes, they learn from them, they improvise and they keep going.

We reached out to some of the travel industry entrepreneurs, who made news this year, to share the lessons from their journey so far. Here are some of them:

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, OYO Rooms

If there is one startup that stirred up the travel industry ecosystem this year, it has to be OYO Rooms. Ritesh Agarwal started his entrepreneurial journey at a very young age and went on to become the first Indian to win Thiel Fellowship. He started OYO Rooms to address the lack of quality hotel accommodation in India by offering predictable and affordable options. They have a network of hotels across 160 cities in India where they are offering great value to the travellers and the tourism ecosystem. This year, the budget hotel aggregator raised over USD 125 million funding and expanded fast enough to threaten some of the biggest names in the industry.

He shared, “In 2015, we learnt from experience that if you can showcase demonstrable benefits to business-owners, and utilize technology to manage everyday business problems, even a legacy industry such as Hotels can be modernized. In over 4000 hotels across India, hotel-owners use our business apps to manage inventory, revenue and CRM.

Lastly, it is critical to build a great team and stay agile. Our hyper-growth coupled with strong unit-economics would not have been possible were it not for diligent operations focus executed by high-quality talent.”

Yogendra Vauspal, Founder, Stayzilla

Yogendra is another entrepreneur who started his journey at a very young age. He started with various web and e-commerce projects after dropping out of engineering at the age of 19. As he went deeper into this space, he went on to launch an e-commerce portal of his own. Eventually he launched the accommodation portal Stayzilla. With the message ‘Make room for something new’, this year Stayzilla shifted focus to homestays and other form of alternative stays.

Talking about his learning from the same, Yogendra said, “Indians are not really closed minded or fragmented by various lines of preference as we like to believe. We are witnessing a beautiful expression of opening up homes or extra rooms for a variety of demographics and an ease with which homeowners have adopted the concept. Although they can select at deeper levels on basis language and food habits, we are seeing the selections happening at a very broad level of traveller type and there is a larger openness in the people than we actually believe exists. Indian homeowners are much more open when it comes to hosting guests and I believe this was the biggest learning of 2015 for us at Stayzilla.”

Sankalp Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, TravelTriangle

With entrepreneurship in his blood, Sankalp Agarwal is the co-founder of TravelTriangle, India’s first full-stack holiday marketplace. At TravelTriangle, he leads the company vision and is intrinsically involved in fundraising, business growth & creating a world class team. He held a lucrative post at Adobe before his own entrepreneurial venture. His innovative nature led him to tackle various technological gaps in day to day life during his college days and he is trying to do something similar for travellers with TravelTriangle.

Emphasising the right growth strategy for a startup, he said, “For a business the first and foremost thing is to chase 100 fans. In the category having 100 fans who will talk about you is way better than having 1 million people liking you. As for a startup- look at the growth in this way. One starts from the garage moves on to a small office which leads to a tribe of followers converting into a village and eventually a nation. When you are in garage phase you have to invest in the product, relentlessly pursue the product till there is traction and as you move into a small office get the generalist and right product market fit people. Once you move to a tribe format you will need specialist like Marketing- HR function to take care of your business. It’s a constant process of evolution which comes through growing with right intent.”

Gautam Shewakramani, Founder & CEO, AudioCompass

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Gautam did his undergrad in Computer Science and Film and then went on to business school at MIT Sloan in Boston. After moving back to his home, he spent some time actively working with and seed investing in startups and that is when he got inspired to start AudioCompass. AudioCompass offers audio guidebooks for a large number of tourist attractions through a very simple mobile app. This year AudioCompass expanded to Oman and also won the Start Tel Aviv award.

Highlighting the importance of business associations, Gautam said, “One of the biggest challenges for us in building AudioCompass has been convincing some of the legacy travel industry players that customers are ready for change. In travel, change has been demand driven, i.e. consumers are demanding change before suppliers are offering it. AudioCompass’ early success and validation has come from the fact that we saw a gap and anticipated the consumer need of wanting to be empowered while traveling.”

Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO, Fxkart.com

Exchanging money is a hassle in India and there is a lack of information about the processes and formalities. Dr. Mushtaq Shah, who was head of research for Equinox Capital Management, founded Fxkart after facing the problem dealing with individual Forex dealers during his frequent international trips. After founding Fxkart, he got Abdul Hadi Shaikh on-board as CEO. Abdul was the head of research at Ratings Intelligence, an ethical investment advisory firm in London before joining Fxkart. After the launch this year, Fxkart was quick to introduce a mobile app and partner with AirAsia.

Speaking from his experience of building a marketplace business, Abdul Hadi Shaikh said, “As an aggregator our biggest challenge was to work on both sides of the business. We thought that enabling tech for the dealers would be the easier part but we really had to swim against the tide to get 650+ dealer locations while the customers adopted quickly. That was something we didn’t expect but that was ground reality. Learning – Assumptions are good but they are not necessarily the right way”

Sidharth Gupta, Co-Founder, Treebo Hotels

The budget hotel industry has seen lot of activity this year and another startup that stood out in this space is Treebo Hotels. Treebo Hotels officially started in June and raised series A funds from Matrix and SAIF Partners in June itself, making it one of the fastest series A fund raised by a tech startup since inception. The co-founder Sidharth comes with a very strong educational background and has worked with McKinsey and Company for years before joining hands with Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain to start Treebo Hotels.

Focusing on the value offered by a startup, Sidharth said, “In the current heady environment it’s easy for new entrepreneurs to be misled into doing a lot of jazzy things, quickly. It’s also easy for them to believe that funding and PR are their given rights! But I think founders need to first ask themselves the question – ‘What is our single biggest value addition to the customer’s life?’ ‘What is our reason for existence?’ ‘What is our core?’. They must develop clarity on this, and then relentlessly work on offering this value to the customer over and over again. Once you get this right everything else – growth, funding, revenue, PR, etc. – will follow”

Benny Kao, Co-Founder, TripVerse

Benny has always been fascinated with technology and how it changes the world. He holds experience of working with some big names in the industry. Being an avid traveller, he often faced problem managing his trips with the existing tools which inspired him to start TripVerse. TripVerse allows travellers to discover authentic user generated trip ideas and create their own itineraries to keep them informed even offline. Recently the startup was selected to be a part of Amadeus’ travel startup initiative Amadeus Next.

Emphasising the importance of simplifying user experience, Benny said, “With so much information available on the internet, travel planning isn’t really easier and simpler than before. The information overload we have today might have made travel planning a more lengthy process. I believe true value lies in presenting travellers information that is relevant and actionable”

Kunal Jain, Co-Founder, Your Local Cousin

It isn’t easy to plan activities for your trip when you are travelling there for the first time. The problem takes another scale, especially when you are travelling to an international destination. This inspired Kunal to start Your Local Cousin. It is a peer to peer service which connects travellers to a local expert and as travellers look for the human connect in travel, such services are picking up fast. This allows them to explore like a local and not like a tourist.

Kunal emphasised on the importance of networking and said, “Sitting behind your laptop and plugging away all day is not a healthy way to build a startup / business. You should get out, meet people and have a social life and the sooner you figure this out the better you’ll think and perform mentally”

You can also download our list of travel industry predictions by industry experts for the year 2016 here.

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Preparing for an international trip means that you have a million things to take care of before you take off and getting forex is one prominent item on the checklist. Apart from the frequently varying exchange rates and lack of awareness, there are other issues like reliability of vendor. The vendors at airports charge very high exchange rates and customers get a petty amount for their money.

During SATTE Mumbai West, we came across a startup that is trying to simplify the forex exchange process for travellers. Bengaluru based startup, Fxkart offers exhange rates from multiple verified vendors and gets everything done at your doorstep.

We did get a chance to have a chat with Mr. Ankit Anubhav, Head- Marketing & PR at Fxkart and he shared the brand’s vision with us. For the record, Fxkart.com had received Rs 12.52 cr in seed funding earlier this year.

This video also marks the start of our new conversation series TravHQ Talks. You will see more stories of interesting startups and decision makers from the industy under TravHQ Talks in the coming weeks. If you are interested to be a part of TravHQ Talks, drop us a note at info@travhq.com.

The post TravHQ Talks: In Conversation with Ankit Anubhav, Head- Marketing and PR, FxKart appeared first on TravHQ.

So then the first day of SATTE turned out to be an exciting one with number of conversations involving industry stakeholders. We have been waiting for SATTE for months because such events offer great opportunity to meet innovative people from the travel industry verticals. Day 1 witnessed an impressive level of participation from various businesses and visitor footfalls. Among the exhibitors were budget hotel aggregators, domestic and international destinations, travel agencies and few technology startups as well. Here is a photologue of some of the exhibitors from the event.

Detailed event report and fact-file will follow soon.

Vista Rooms is a budget hotel aggregator offering rebranded and standardised hotel rooms

Maharashtra Tourism had multiple representatives promoting different aspects of tourism in the state

The representative of J&K Tourism was very happy to share how the state plans on using social media to promote lesser known destinations in-order to boost tourism

The Tourism Malaysia representatives talked about their activities on digital to promote their ‘Year of festivals’

FXKart allows you to get foreign currency online with multiple dealers bidding to offer the best price

This was just a quick roundup of some of the exhibitors at the event. Follow our Twitter feed for the latest updates on SATTE.

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