Corporate travel has been taking its own sweet time to modernize. While consumer travel has evolved with a demanding customer base, business travel still seems to be stuck with legacy issues. More than 90% of the market is still being served offline via a complex maze of travel desks, travel management companies and corporate travel managers. Multiple email exchanges between the travel desk, the human resources team, and an employee makes travel cumbersome.

Here steps in Insteract Technologies, a cloud-based platform, which offers a transparent and convenient way to buy business travel for SMEs. The Bengaluru-based company, founded in July 2015 by three friends – Anandkumar Chandran, Kiran Balimane, and Balaji Ramakrishnan – offers personalised, relevant, and cost-effective travel options to the business traveller by comparing and sourcing lowest relevant options from the market, as per a traveller’s preferences and business rule.

The idea for the business came when the founders were working at Verchaska (Balaji Ramakrishnan’s first venture), which was building legacy software, on-premise solutions, for the global travel industry. They quit the company in 2015, and started Insteract. The three co-founders seeded the company with $250,000 and began to build a product that centralises a company’s travel data, and provides analytics, benchmarking, and guidance to influence employees to make better travel decisions that save money, and comply with their company’s travel policy. The product was launched in January 2016, and went live with 45 corporate customers. Since then, Insteract has acquired 400 clients.

Insteract aims to make travel planning smart and transparent for businesses. The company’s ‘intelligent travel agent’ Hellolosa provides the end user with a real-time cost range produced by data analytics that track fares through real-time benchmarking of market. All options are benchmarked with the lowest logical market fare so customers get a clear picture of what they are buying. Insteract shows the top seven logical options to choose from. It’s unique profiling algorithm evaluates each available option through numerous travel parameters that match with the behaviour of traveller with the company policy. Some of the options are exclusive to them and offer the best value.

Price cap and benchmarks are tagged to each trip request and can be viewed at any time by everyone involved in the workflow. The customer can configure workflows based on spend limits and job titles for teams of any size across the company across any locations.

At the core of Insteract lies the aim to improve the effectiveness of travel programmes. Insteract identifies insights into points of friction between a traveller and travel policy and gives recommendations to optimise travel cost. It provides an absolute and relative comparisons between the traveller behaviour and booking patterns so companies can assess where they stand in comparison to industry benchmarks.

Our take –

The party is just getting started in this space. Business travel has immense potential to become automated, more than leisure travel, because it is a more frequent activity. Corporates are finally starting to look for tools that will virtualise their travel desk function. Here, products like the one by Insteract, can deliver and improve on travel services, thanks to AI and machine learning. It will be pretty exciting to see how the company takes this forward by partnering with different elements of the travel industry, and make a dent in the legacy software business as well.

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On the back of a fast growing economy and rising income levels, a significant portion of wealth being spent by Indians is now on traveling and vacationing abroad. As a result, the travel and tourism industry sector is on the path to adding $160 billion to the GDP by 2026.

To address the increasing number of Indians travelling, numerous startups have also emerged to meet their demands. The Indian startup sector is buoyant as entrepreneurs are racing to provide services for the country’s online population.

Here are our top travel startup picks for the month:

1. WanderGupt – infusing mystery into travel

Jatin Adlakhia is a strong proponent of experiential travel, an idea gaining ground in the West but largely unexplored in India. Having been a traveller for four years, one thing he felt very bad about was the fact that people were working even on a vacation – professional work, or personal, or planning the itinerary. Through his startup WanderGupt, Jatin is promoting tours where only a rough sketch of the itinerary is given to travellers. The destinations are all kept secret and the emphasis is on getting a feel of the place before moving on to the next.

Jatin says he believes that homestays, village tours, meaningful interaction with locals, travel games and long walks are all needed to explore a place in all its beauty, which takes at least one week at every place. His startup lines up ‘gupt’ (secret) trips for large groups of people to different parts of the country.

2. Mihuru – making travel easy on the pockets

Mihuru, a travel fintech startup based in Mumbai, is an easy and convenient way for travellers to pay for their flight tickets in EMIs, without needing a credit card or credit scores.

Mihuru, which means ‘My Freedom’, aims to help Indians, especially the generation of millennial travellers, travel more often and more freely, without worrying about large upfront costs associated with flight tickets. Helmed by Shruti Mehrotra and her co-founder and advisor, Jonathan Nunez Gonzalez, Mihuru is the first company in India to enable travellers to book their flights with a deposit of just around 20% upfront and pay the balance in installments before they fly.

The startup has also adopted a unique method of assessing the credibility of their customers before providing them with instant credit for booking their flight tickets. The evaluation is done by a close observation of the digital footprint of the customer and a simple psychometric examination. Mihuru’s affordable payment plans offered through its innovative product Mihuru PayLater, with a simple, fully online, real time credit evaluation makes this credit available to emerging travellers. The startup also has an integrated travel discovery platform that personalizes discovery of curated destinations and activities and also recommends the best flight options for the traveller, inspiring them to avail the credit to book their flights instantly.

3. Startup India Yatra – giving wings to upcoming entrepreneurs

Organized under the Startup India initiative, Startup India Yatra is a series of events that will travel to small cities of India to search for entrepreneurial talent and help develop startup ecosystem in the state. Said to be one of the largest Tier II and III initiatives undertaken by the government, Startup India Yatra has helped 10,000-plus aspiring entrepreneurs in two states.

Launched in 2016, Startup India intends to build a solid ecosystem for nurturing innovation and startups in the country to drive sustainable economic growth and generate large-scale employment opportunities.In every state, the Startup Yatra will follow a five-step procedure to support the startup ecosystem in Tier II and III cities. These include initiatives to train colleges/universities for establishing e-cells and spreading the spirit of entrepreneurship, launch of Startup Yatra in respective states, 10 to 12 boot camps to be organised in various districts in every state, acceleration programme where ideas shortlisted from boot camps will receive three days of intensive mentoring from Startup India and its partners, and finally shortlisted ideas will pitch to the state incubators and winners of the Yatra will receive incubation offers, cash prizes, and other benefits. Startup India Yatra recently travelled to its fourth destination – Uttarakhand, conducting boot camps to handhold entrepreneurs to scale their idea to the next level.

For more on our startup coverage, read here.

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