One organization that has been tirelessly working on bringing together the unorganised and fragmented homestay segment and increasing focus on this space, is Stay On Skill. The company that tries to find a way to let you travel more while minimising the hit on your credit card, is now launching India’s first marketing accelerator that will help homestays skyrocket their customer base, revenue and brand value in an intensive three-month programme.

Each month Stay On Skill will send three selected travel influencers to a homestay, where they will experience the offerings of the property and promote it on their respective social media channels. Additionally, every month there’ll be Masterclasses by experts on different topics to help them grow their business. From customized marketing strategies, to analysis of online presence, Stay on Skill will ensure that by the end of these three months, the properties would have not only increased their reach but also understood the nitty-gritty of marketing themselves better.

TravHQ spoke to Arjun Tuli, founder of Stay On Skill, about the programme and the company’s plans of giving homestays across India a much-needed social boost.

1. What was the trigger behind launching an accelerator programme?

Stay On Skill in the last one year has helped numerous commercial properties in different aspects. Duing all of this one thing that we have realised it – hotels and homestays in India are popping up like wild mushrooms. In the city of Ooty itself there are more than 2000 hotels (and these are just the ones that are listed online). Across India, more than 1,75,000 properties are taking online bookings. Amid all of this, the problem is – how do you make people know that you exist? Listing on platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com doesn’t ensure you visibility or bookings. If your property shows up on the second page of Airbnb, you might as well forget that prospective customers will get to know about you. One good way to stand out from the crowd is to create a brand for yourself digitally – through social media, blogging, and video creation. But unfortunately, most homestays or hotels are not much aware of to how to go about it. Our analysis show that many of them in the past have been cheated by fake bloggers and instagram influencers, who either don’t have authentic following or high traffic.

So, at Stay On Skill, we decided to make these things transparent for properties and provide them some real value. The idea behind the accelerator is to help the deserving properties get the visibility they deserve, and the complete three-month program is designed around that. We won’t only be sending curated travel influencers to their property, but also teaching them how to make more revenue through different digital marketing techniques, and how to perform well on booking portals.

2. What according to you are the benefits of having such accelerator programmes in place in the travel industry?

On a broader scale benefits would include –
1) Properties gain visibility.
2) They get access to star influencers who have the ability to make their property go viral.
3) They get access to Masterclasses on different aspects of Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Booking, so that after the accelerator they can take forward the learnings and start executing it themselves.
4) Build a brand value – when some good influencers get associated with your property, it creates a great brand value for you. (Unfortunately, most properties don’t know how to capitalise on that)
5) Increased brand value and visibility leading to increase in revenue.

3. What are the long-term gains that you see arising from this programme?

In these three months, Stay On Skill will provide the properties a great exposure in terms of visibility and brand value. Although visibility is short lived, brand value is not. If the properties can cash in on this brand value, it will have a long term effect on the kind of customers they attract.

The properties also gain immense knowledge from the Masterclasses. Each Masterclass is designed to provide specific insights to the property owners, that they can use to enrich the experience of their customers, and thereby increase their revenue. The knowledge from these won’t run out with time. If you execute it, you are bound to gain and add a lasting value to your business.

4. Big brands like Expedia and Marriott have already conducted accelerator programmes for their listed hotels, or improving customer experience. Is yours the first-of-its-kind offering for homestays?

If you go through the accelerator program by Expedia, it was aimed at moving hotels higher up in ranking on their own portal by giving an additional 10% cut in the bookings.
There was no addition to the property in terms of brand value, digital exposure or knowledge.

Stay On Skill accelerator is built around a completely different value addition. We are highly selective in the properties that we chose for the accelerator. We have limited them to just 10. The idea is provide them the maximum benefit through exposure and sharing our learning of this industry.

The Stay On Skill accelerator is not just limited to homestays. It’s open to hotels as well, as long as they fulfill our acceptance criteria – there should be something unique about the property – which we analyse basis the different parameters of stay, lodging, food, culture and experience.

5. How is homestay marketing expanding and evolving, particularly in India?

The homestay market in India is expanding at a faster rate than it ever was, especially in the areas of Himachal, Uttarakhand – where the locals are now realising the potential that tourism holds. For locals, getting into the tourism industry also means that you are not investing your time in doing activities like drugs, and tourism has helped a lot in that perspective – giving employment to many.

6. Isn’t there a fear that if the properties don’t get conversions in terms of revenue, despite the huge reach that you are promising, they may come back to you disappointed?

Not really. What Stay On Skill is really good at is providing the properties with immense visibility at a very low cost of investment. Thereby, helping them build a brand and name for themselves in the industry. Along with this, we equip the properties with knowledge required to convert the leads into customers. But if after this conversion doesn’t happen, then it means there’s some other aspect of the property that is lacking, which we need to identify and help overcome – which we shall do.

And this particular batch of the Stay On Skill accelerator is Not For Profit . All that we’ll be receiving from the properties will go towards payment of the bloggers, influencers, graphic designers and social media experts – we won’t be making a profit of a single penny from it.

7. What are Stay On Skill’s future plans regarding this programme?

We started the Stay On Skill accelerator as medium to share our knowledge and expertise with the properties and help them benefit from it. If we are able to make it happen at a small scale of 10 properties, next time around we’ll try to make an effort to reach a wider audience and help more properties benefit from it.

The application for the first batch closes on August 31. If you are a homestay or a hotel looking to increase your digital presence, apply here – http://stayonskill.com/accelerator.html.

The post Stay On Skill launches India’s first marketing accelerator for homestays appeared first on TravHQ.

Skill as a currency is an inescapable necessity. Quantifying those skillsets can create a new self-aware economy that can facilitate connection and trading of those skills. Stay On Skill does the same, by providing a platform for homeowners to offer a place to travellers with expertise on skills they are interested in learning.

To boost this initiative further, the startup is organizing a first-of-its-kind TravelX Talks on April 15, 2018 at Amritsar, with the aim to facilitate a unique gathering of a community that is open to learning about different skills from some of the top influencers of India, sparking conversation and initiating connections in the process.

After two successful meetups in Dharamshala and Manali, the founders of Stay On Skill, Arjun Tuli and Rajshree Bothra, understood that experiencing a trip with fellow skilled experts from different domains was a far more enriching experience than travelling with known faces, friends or colleagues. By swapping stories and life-changing experiences, people can actually apply best practices to their own challenges and overcome them.

Founders Rajshree Bothra and Arjun Tuli

A picture from Stay on Skill’s Manali meetup

That inspired the duo to provide a platform where a panel of curated experts could share their daily hustles, challenges and solutions on various topics, and inspire people looking to take a similar path in life.

The speakers for the event include TEDx speaker Heena Raheja; Jony Jindal, the youngest Indian to do a solo tour of the country; BBC filmmaker Yashi Malviya; full time travel blogger and photographer Himani Chhabra; videographer Sahil Singh; artist and graphic designer Niharika Arora; entreprenuer, vlogger and musician Satyam Aggarwal; and Yogesh Mankani, a successful public speaker and entrepreneur.

The topics will range from building strong networks in different cities while travelling, to tips and tricks of travelling freely across India, and from creating videos that engage people, to learning how to travel while being jobless.

The event will be held at Cafe Chokolade in Amritsar and is a free-of-cost entry. City On Pedals is the travelling partner for the meetup, while Nomads Hostel is the stay and food partner.

The idea of trading skills for free travel accommodation is not new, but mostly involves doing some work in exchange for free food and stay.

“People travelling for vacations in great places don’t necessarily want to spend hours on work that is boring or monotonous,” says Arjun Tuli. So the founders decided to focus on homestays and on refined skills and knowledge like music or yoga, coding and writing, which guests could teach in their spare time while also enjoying their vacation.

“Most of them do a barter – a substitute for manual labour. However, here you are teaching something you are very passionate about. That is the gap we are trying to fill with our initiatives,” he added.

So far, more than 150 trips have happened through Stay On Skill, and people have saved over INR 9.5 lakh in stay expenses. Read more about Stay on Skill’s initiatives, here.

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We can learn something from every new person we meet. This holds even more relevance when we talk about people from different cultural backgrounds carrying experiences different than ours. Probably that is why it is said that travel makes you richer.

While travel enriches you, the costs of hotels and flights can add up quickly and dent your finances. Stay On Skill tries to find a way to let you travel more while minimising the hit on your credit card. It provides a platform for homeowners to offer a place to travellers with expertise on skills they are interested in learning. Free piano lessons? That extra bed will get you that. The travellers get a free homestay and save on hotel / Airbnb costs in return.

The idea for Stay On Skills popped up after Arjun Tuli, a serial entrepreneur, was trying to cook travel plans with little money in hand after he ended up investing his savings in his previous startup. After narrowing down to an idea that felt right, he joined hands with Rajshree Bothra, previously GM-Marketing at Whirlpool India and Principal growth at Zivame, to build the product.

Learning from his previous experiences, Arjun first wanted to test and validate the idea with a pool of fitting users, before directing resources towards building a complicated tech solution. With help from Abhishek Garg, core team member at Morpheus Gang, Arjun and Rajshree sketched plans to validate the idea and to begin, they came up with campaign titled ‘Skill India Campaign’ to get feedback and identify challenges.

With the campaign, they are inviting ‘learners’ to host selected skilled people from around the world to gain new skills. Of course there is the other side of this campaign as well, called ‘India Tour 2017’ which invites experts to teach their skills while they travel. Arjun shares that the campaign has attracted a good number of travellers with around 48 percent of the entries coming from solo female travellers carrying experience of designing, digital marketing, blogging and more. This is certainly a positive sign considering that most P2P travel platforms (including Couchsurfing) had a gender imbalance in the early days.

Arjun is also quick to point out that while it might appear that the ‘experts’ are just people looking to travel for cheap, that is not exactly the case. Instead, in most cases, they are experienced people from different domains looking for a way to give back to the society and to connect with people in smaller cities. Among the registrations, they have also received entries from professional musicians, famous theatre artists and VCs.

While the idea is certainly very intriguing, it faces the key challenges associated with any P2P business. Building communities on both ends is a tall order and will create roadblocks in marketing as they will have to pick sides in their communication. Accepting the same, Arjun says that instead of a user base, it is like building a huge family sharing the same vision and is indeed the hardest part. To top that up, India is certainly a tough market with high expectations and low trust.

On the flipside, with a stronger focus on ‘skills’ as currency and more data on travellers, Stay On Skills can win where Couchsurfing went haywire. Couchsurfing started in the true spirit of travelling with a powerful community but with no clear barriers, it diluted and started to repel even the loyalists. This is where Stay On Skill can shine. They have designed their sign up process to virtually incentivise users for providing more details, connecting LinkedIn and signing up as learner (host) as well. Arjun comments that the travellers signing up on the platform should bring something to the table and will have to bring validations for the skills they claim to have. For the growth of the platform, it is very important that value is delivered to the learners.

They plan to do a public launch after the campaigns conclude. The registrations for the campaign are open till May 25, 217. You can register as a learner to host experts on topics you are interested in or register as an expert and teach someone a new skill while exploring new places. You can direct your feedback and queries to Arjun Tuli.

The post Stay On Skill wants to trade your skills for a homestay appeared first on TravHQ.