Luxury vacation marketplace Rizort has closed a seed round of funding of $2.9 million from a variety of angel investors. The company that launched in March with a focus on destinations in Southeast Asia, such as Bali, raised this round of investment from Blume Ventures, Dream Incubators Japan, and a few others.

The company leverages virtual reality content for Oculus Rift or Oculus Go devices to showcase the destination resorts along with artificial intelligence to generate recommendations that are relevant to a traveller’s interests. A travellers can then explore their room and other experiences provided by their destination resorts, which helps Rizort understand their travel preferences, and book vacation packages accordingly.

Rizort allows travellers to design their own itineraries, based on their travel intent and preferences

Rizort believes in letting travellers design and build their own itinerary based on their intentions and interests. They offer the flexibility to either start from a recommended collection and add/modify experiences to it or build entire itinerary from scratch.

The company also has a Rizort Concierge App that acts as a personal concierge allowing visitors to access their collection details, scheduled experiences, reminders and notifications while exploring additional experiences around them. It also acts as a local guide and support for all things that they may require during the vacation.

Watch the video below to understand how the platform works –

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Metasearch sites have been disrupting the hotel distribution landscape for a long time now. By creating an attractive third avenue for hotels to market themselves, it has presented a hopeful medium between direct bookings and the OTAs. And as travellers demand quick and easy access to accurate comparison data, the use of metasearch is also rising.

However, metasearch now have the capacity to not just add value to consumers, but also to suppliers, when they are tasked with comparing more than just prices of hotels and airfares. This is where startups like TripShelf step in.

TripShelf is an online holidays packages marketplace that helps tour operators grow and manage their business. Founded by Dhruv Raj Gupta, Sukhmani Singh and Jai Raj Gupta in the year 2016, the New Delhi-based company helps builds brands, market packages, and drive high quality leads. While Dhruv Raj Gupta’s past work experience includes a stint at Google, Sukhmani Singh is ex-AT Kearney and Jai Raj Gupta has founded a successful venture Shaadionline in the past.

The TripShelf team at the recently concluded OTM Mumbai

Tour operators can list their holiday packages on TripShelf and travellers can discover, compare, and buy these packages from them. The company specialises in curating high-quality tour operators on the platform and providing a combination of budget and luxury holiday packages to popular destinations. The platform lets customers compare data listed on the online marketplace and once selected, the customer is directed to the supplier’s website for bookings.

TripShelf’s USP is the machine learning tools adopted to make it easier and faster for tour operators to focus on the customers who are going to convert. The company markets their packages, provides them with high-quality leads, and through a single-window, real-time CRM, helps them manage those leads better. From customer data and call logs, to conversion predictability score and custom templates for quotes, TripShelf’s suite of tools keeps operators ahead of the curve. Additionally, tour operators can also use the portal for launches and promotions.

The company claims to have more than 500 tour operators on its platform, selling more than 1700 holiday packages. In December 2016, TripShelf raised INR 1.6 crore in pre-Series A round of funding, from GEMS Advisory and venture capital fund Quarizon.

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GoFro, the online travel marketplace targeted at providing leisure travellers with travel packages, has partnered with multiple leading travel industry players. With the new partnerships, GoFro is looking to offer a wider array of products which the buyers can browse and choose from, without having to skip through multiple websites or apps. The partners include companies like Thomas Cook, Yatra, MakeMyTrip, Paras Holidays, Contiki, Byond Travel, Flamingo Transworld Pvt. Ltd., Guidelines Travels and many more. Being associated with all leading tour operators, GoFro aims to become the one stop destination for anyone looking for a travel package.

This move will not only help the customers make a more informed decision but also open up a new channel for the partners. Some of the partners are limited in their online reach or their geographical popularity and the association could enable them to reach newer set of customers.

Speaking on the announcement, Mr. Amitabh Misra, Founder, GoFro said, “It is another big step by GoFro to become India’s first and largest travel marketplace. It will change the whole ecosystem which is currently very fragmented. Now the power lies in the hands of the consumer, they don’t have to spend lot of time visiting different websites and travel agents, they can simply visit GoFro, compare packages by all the travel agents. Booking a travel package will be as simple as booking a flight ticket from any flight aggregator. It will also help travel companies to understand the consumer in competitive markets and offer best deals to acquire new customers.”

One of Travel partners, Vikram Ahuja, Founder & CEO, Byond Travel “GoFro has drastically simplified the customer purchase process and at Byond Travel we are very excited to partner with them to help reach our potential customers with exactly the kind of information they need in the most convenient manner”

Started in June 2016, GoFro has been gaining momentum quickly. Starting with a handful of destinations, it currently offers travel packages for over 70 destinations from over 200 tour operators. The parent company of GoFro, Bonavita Technologies Private Limited is backed by MakeMyTrip. More details at GoFro.com.

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Online travel marketplaces add a layer between the provider and customer to guide the customer and provide quality service. In the past few years, we have seen growth in this segment of travel industry. As the competition between online travel marketplaces turns intense, they are constantly pushing themselves to please the customers in different ways. One of them is to ensure high quality standards and that is exactly what TravelTriangle is trying to do.

People don’t want to spend the weekend in the comfort of their home anymore. They are looking to travel and explore new places on every chance they get. TravelTriangle offers weekend getaways from a large number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities to cater to such travellers and as you would expect, it equal amount of interest from women travellers as well. However they are also concerned about the safety and hygiene issues they encounter during their travel.

During their research and market understanding, the team at TravelTriangle notice this challenge and the realised the need to put systems in place to inspire confidence in the women travellers.

Speaking about the research, Rohit Garhwal, AVP Sales – Weekend Getaway Experiments, said, “There are so many issues on a ground level as far as women travel is concerned, and they are beyond the normal concerns of ‘what kind of hotels’ to ‘what kind of place they will eat’. In case of women, we realized that proper Hygiene goes a long way in creating an impact. Clean washrooms during the trip, right amount of stoppages while travelling, and security and safety are amongst the most critical buckets.”

To ensure safety, they verify the details of bus drivers and co passengers while offering priority seating for women. Along with that, they add additional security measures for women only trips to create secure and joyous holiday experience for them.

He added, “We are obsessed about our customer feedback and we take it very seriously. Even a single mistake can lead to heavy losses to partners, and even teams.” TravelTriangle claims that the strong focus on delivering quality has received them 94.56 percent positive response since its inception.

Despite so many players trying to organise this segment, it continues to be highly fragmented posing various challenges. Tech enabled marketplaces like TravelTriangle are trying to change that and minimise the unpredictability. Small steps like these go a long way in gaining the trust of customers and positioning the brand well in the highly competitive market.

You can read more about the fast growing segment of online marketplaces here.

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Earlier this year, Paytm entered the travel industry with the option to book bus tickets. It partnered with several operators and aggregators to offer tickets on their platform. Paytm’s intentions of moving into the hotel booking space were very clear at that stage only. The hotel booking feature will work in partnership with various providers like GoIbibo and Yatra as well as budget hotel chains like OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms.

The Paytm hotel booking will be available through both the website and mobile app. With the trust the brand has built among buyers over the short period of time, it shouldn’t be very hard for them to ramp up the offering quickly. It has been reported that we might see dynamic pricing based on the inventory and features like anytime check-in and check-out.

While online travel booking services will have an additional channel to drive bookings, Paytm hotel booking service can provide a good platform for offline agents to list and sell. Right now Paytm lists various deals in travel space that you can buy to redeem later. For hotel bookings, they will rely on the APIs of booking providers. With a large number of people already using the Paytm wallet to make most of their online payments, they can offer frictionless payments and faster checkouts.

Hotel booking isn’t the only new service coming to Paytm. It has been reported that they will be introducing a hyperlocal service. It will initially focus on food ordering, movie tickets and other neighbourhood deals before moving to more services. It will compete with Grofers and recently introduced Nearby by Flipkart in this space among other players. Paytm is also expected to invest more into its e-tailing business and integrate Chinese sellers from Alibaba on its platform to offer low prices and new products.

How do you think Paytm hotel booking feature will affect other players in this space?

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