Travel booking and concierge service Trip Tap Toe has raised fresh round of capital in exchange for 26 percent stake for an undisclosed amount. Mr. R.S. Sharma. Former Chairman and Managing Director of India’s premier national oil company – Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, made the seed investment. Mr. Sharma, is also serving as Senior Advisor for McKinsey & Company.

While the terms of transaction haven’t been disclosed, the company plans to use the funds towards expanding the sales team, planning new marketing initiatives and further fine tuning the product to improve user experience.

Manuraj Singh Johar, Founder & CEO of Trip Tap Toe, says, “ We have received amazing response to our concierge app. Every early stage venture hopes to raise capital and attain strategic assistance to take its product to the market. This fresh seed-funding shot will help us accelerate our efforts and establish credibility in the industry. We also believe that fundraising is about finding good partners, and we are very excited about taking this journey forward with Mr. Sharma. This new partnership will help us improve our technology & bring to our customers an improved flights & hotels booking experience on both mobile & web.”

Trip Tap Toe offers an array of travel booking options through its website along with a large database of itineraries and activities for travellers to choose from. The highlight however, is the app which takes a millennial friendly approach and offers all the services and travel advice through chat. Messaging is certainly a focus area for many brands now and even the popular social media platforms are bullish on the same. Getting the services on chat allows brands to simplify the user experience significantly while getting rid of the barrier of getting users acquainted to a new interface.

You can find more details about Trip Tap Toe here.

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There is no denying the fact that chat apps are among the most used apps on our mobile devices and that is why, travel brands are exploring chat as a medium to communicate with the customers. Major brands are integrating chat features in their own app or are using platforms like Messenger to serve their customers on chat.

With this trend sure to gain momentum, a young startup based out of Mumbai is building an end to end travel assistant for almost everything you might need related to your travel. Go Hero Go aims to simplify the travel booking process by eliminating the need of selecting options from drop down menus and enables the user to simply type in the requirements to make the bookings. The system utilises artificial intelligence to learn the preferences of a traveller so that the only the most relevant options are served.

Go Hero Go was founded by Snehal Dhruve and Bineet Desai. Snehal has got strong experience of working on AI based technologies while Bineet carries expertise in Business Development and Relationship Management.

A large fraction of the users are already acquainted with chat as a medium so getting them used to it isn’t a challenge and thus making requests is easy. It also allows for the information to be communicated in a more direct manner as compared to voice and for the system, text requires less processing time resulting in faster responses.

Talking about the other startups that have emerged in this space, Bineet shares that there are players like Assist, Haptik, Wishup and few more but none of them stand directly against Go Hero Go. A number of them offer wide array of services with travel forming one minor part while few others are relying primarily on human operators to serve the customers. Go Hero Go uses technology as the primary communication medium.

Bineet Desai, CFO & Head-Business Development and Snehal Dhruve, Co-founder & CTO

The system uses AI to process the customer request based on NLP within a chat to ensure quick responses while keeping the staff requirements to a minimum. The requests are taken care of by the backend booking engine which uses multiple APIs to fulfil bookings. A CRM system collects the data about customer behaviour to offer tailored recommendations without flooding with a sea of options. The payments are handled by third party solutions including options like PayPal and Instamojo.

The Android and iOS apps are live along with the web version of Go Hero Go. However, to further increase adoption and eliminate the need of downloading the app, they are working on integrating the system with other chat apps like Messenger, Telegram, Line, Kik and even on making it accessible through SMS. This would make it easier for them to get new users to try out the service and the users will prefer it over keeping an extra travel booking app on their devices.

Travel Startups Incubator managed by Matt Zito recently invested in Go Hero Go. Bineet shares that the association would not only add value with the mentorship and industry knowledge but also help them enhance their partnerships and networks thus helping business development.

The travel chat segment is a big opportunity and we will certainly see the entry of many new players. Go Hero Go has a first mover advantage being the first of its kind service in India and as they further strengthen their technology and automate more of their processes, the barriers of entry for others will continue to rise. It will be interesting to see how this segment shapes up in India.

You can find more details about Go Hero Go here: Website | Android App | iOS App

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Tripoto, the global community for travellers, has launched a new AI based travel concierge called Tripoto.Ai. The service is in beta phase at this moment and it responds to a wide range of queries covering destinations, hotels, activities, getaways and lot more. While the feature has been introduced only a few days back, it responds quite sensibly for most queries.

We have recently seen a rise in number of travel companies providing service over chat. We recently learned about Scouterr which provides travel bookings and advice with the help of travel agents available on chat. Hotel giant Marriott International also introduced the feature of chat based room service requests in their mobile app. This trend is particularly catching up because younger travellers are much used to the chat platforms and are very comfortable adopting that.

Tripoto claims that over 5,000 people have already used the new Tripoto.Ai. The system utilises advanced natural language processing with machine learning algorithms. This allows it to self-learn over time from the queries it has received. The content comes from the Tripoto community as well as 3^rd party APIs. They claim to have around 250,000 itineraries which provides a good database for the kind of queries Tripoto.Ai could receive over chat.

I tried spending some time trying to put together a travel plan for the long weekend later this month. I managed to get (or the system managed to give) relevant data for all but one query which is pretty impressive for a start. Unlike manually operated chat based services, you don’t have to wait for the responses as they come instantaneously. Considering the fact that it is still a beta, we can safely assume that the final version will continue to impress us.

You can try out the new AI based chat concierge at tripoto.com/travel-assistant.

Source: Inc42

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