India is increasing its huge potential in Tourism, aided by the increasing popularity of Brand India in the world. Electrifi T3 – Accelerator Program in Travel, Tourism and Transportation builds on the huge potential in organizing the travel industry!

1. Seed funding of INR 2 to 30 Lacs to each selected startup
2. 12 weeks program, one day / week intervention
3. Deep corporate connect – giving market access with qualified leads
4. Deep engagement with sector and business mentors
5. Refined Go-To-Market Strategy with test market and course correction

Sub categories under the above sectors are

• Travel – Airlines, Rail, Bus, Car, Truck, Water transport, Spacecraft, EV
• Tourism – Tour Packages, itinerary management, Forex Aggregation
• Transportation – Logistics, Supply Chain & Warehouses, Drone
• Engines – Pricing, Payments, Credit
• Entertainment – Virtual Experiences, Shopping, sight-seeing
• Informational – Tourist Mart, Guide Services, Rating Systems, Back-end Live Information Databases, Loyalty programs
• Horizontal Technologies – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), Internet-of-things (IOT), Block-chain, AR/VR, Facial Recognition technology, Robots, Voice Activated services, Chat-bots

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The below story is from our series of startups spotted at the RTM Forum in Taipei. One such startup is airConcur, which helps airline passengers to request compensation for flight delay or cancellation. The startup which is targeting outbound flyers from Asia entitles them up to a maximum of 600 Euros for compensation. We spoke to the co-founders on the startup’s journey so far, here’s a brief from the conversation.

• Briefly explain the problem airConcur is solving 

airConcur Inc. founded in 2018, is the first flight compensation organization in Asia. We help Asian passengers whose EU flights are delayed or cancelled; the claim is up to 600 Euros. The core value of AirConcur is to help Asian air passengers acknowledge their rights and able to claim for compensation on transportation disruption under EU Regulation. airConcur has a professional legal team from Europe and successful claims are getting higher.

• What made you think of the idea

Our team is from online travel industry, we constantly observe changes in the online travel market, we figured out “after the tour period” market has big potential.

Therefore, we found the law of tourism in europe, especially transportation, we have a chance to try, research and founded airConcur Inc. Every year there are nearly twenty millions of EU-bond passengers from Asia and this is where we start the whole service here, helping them deal with transportation disruptions, and entitle to ticket refund and compensation. We not only provide airline compensation service but also train, rail, bus and ferry in the near future. airConcur comes out with JaaS(Justice as a Service) a travel law solution platform which will provide passengers and TA&OTA an integrated solution, solve these problems for more passengers.

• Which market/markets are you targeting

Whole Asia, mainly our focus is on East Asia and India, our service has expanded significantly to China, Japa, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Korea and India is our next target this year. Our mission is to help passengers in Asia fight for their rights.

• How many customers do you have

In about a year, we have received over one thousand claims in Taiwan, it’s all individual customers, around 30% for flight delays, 40% for flight cancellation, and 30% for strikes. we expect it will be big growth after we cooperate with OTAs by Jaas system.

• Are you bootstrapped or raised funds

As of now, all the 3 co-founders have invested in the venture

• What is your background 

We are all from Internet companies, having experience in the travel industry with stints at KKday, which is Asia’s largest tours and activities platform.  Especially our CEO Dean, is a serial entrepreneur, also successfully sold out his company (Niceday) and sold it to Taiwan’s IPO company. In a nutshell, we know the travel industry very well.

Ｍoreover, our team has expertise on big data, we try to innovate on applying process and flight detection. Now we are developing the JaaS (Justice as a Service), a travel law solution platform which will provide passengers and TA&OTA an integrated solution, solve these problems for more passengers.

• How is the Travel startup ecosystem in Taiwan like 

Along with increase in Outbound Tourists on an annual basis, more and more entrepreneurs and startups focus on the subject, most startups are trying to build platforms such as booking or other service of airlines, hotels and T&A. Now more startups provide holistic solutions or some tools for the travel industry. But there are some concerns, some international platforms such as Booking.com, Klook, Line travel, are grabbing the market share with their abundant resources. Taiwan companies have to connect with more partners in-order to ward off global competition and that is the biggest challenge.

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An online hotel booking company that offers booking hotels by the pack of hours, MiStay has raised an undisclosed amount of investment through investment firm ah! Ventures and a group of investors led by Hyderabad based ex-entrepreneur, Sumit Nagpal. MiStay will utilize the fund to grow the leadership team and also to build up the brand. Founded in 2016 by alumni of IIT Madras, Sandeep Jaiswal & Pranav Prabhakar, MiStay had previously raised the first round of seed investment in late 2017.

Later, the company pivoted from the initial focus on the B2B corporate market to the consumer market in mid-2018. Since then,
MiStay has grown 5 times and hit operational profitability in June this year. “Travelers today no longer want to plan their trip based on the hotels’ check-in time. The hotel industry is poised to transform to meet these evolving travelers’ needs. This transition, however, requires disrupting the age-old technological ecosystem in hotel industry and raising operational capabilities of hotels. We are building the entire ecosystem ground up to enable the flexible hotel stay and be the leader in this market”, said Sandeep Jaiswal, the Co-Founder & CEO at MiStay. The average hotel occupancy rate in India stands at around 65%, thus the unsold hotel rooms constitute around 6 Billion Dollars of missed revenue opportunity for hotels. MiStay creates a new demand of customers who require hotels with early check-in, short-stay or day-use rooms which hotels can tap into to maximize their occupancy and revenue.

“The micro-stay model brings a unique revenue optimization opportunity for the hotels. Our product helps hotels realize their full revenue potential by unlocking the value in hotel inventory during the hours it remains unutilized. Hotels can in fact run at more than 100% occupancy”, said Pranav Prabhakar, the Co-Founder & CTO at MiStay.

MiStay is currently operational in 100 cities with around 1500 hotel partners. Unlike other counterparts who focus on couple-friendly hotels, MiStay sees business travelers or travelers having long layover as the primary target audience. The partner hotels of MiStay include many premium hotel brands such as The Park, Radisson, Holiday Inn as well as mid-scale hotel chains such as Lemon Tree, Mango Hotels, Mint Hotels, 1589 Hotels, Treebo, and others.

“Currently we have divided a full-day into 3 smaller slots of a few hours which costs as low as around 30% of the full-day tariff. We are working closely with the hotels and aim to bring even more flexibility to travelers. Obsession with customer experience has been and will remain the guiding principle for our every move”, added Nupur Singh, who leads customer success at MiStay.
Abhijeet Kumar, Founding Partner at ah! Ventures said “Hotel booking is a very large market and the unique approach of MiStay for inventory optimization will change the way hotel industry operates.

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When you meet 40 something Ken Lau, the solo founder at Adventoro, chances are you won’t find him really that old as he pretends to be.

Founded in November 2016, Ken heads perhaps one of the most exciting adventure travel startups in Malaysia. Ken is a fairly connected entrepreneur thanks to his varied stints across different organizations. He worked for Accenture in late 2009 before making a hard to switch to start a restaurant for a couple of years which was eventually sold-off.

In addition, he was amongst the earliest employees at Zalora Malaysia and was the first employee of MySale.my, a listed company where he worked for over 1.5 years and handled operations for 4 countries Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Singapore.

Ken Lau founder and CEO of Adventoro

Back in 2015, he had an opportunity to work with startup accelerator MAGIC, his role there was more into consulting as an Acceleration Director. He was the mentor in residence, responsible for accelerating startups and was in touch with 200+ startups from Malaysia. He also had a stint with 123RF, the popular image website where he was responsible for steering new projects.

In simple words, Adventoro is a platform for adventure tourism. The startup works with tour operators who are not associated with large tours & activities websites. Adventoro focussed a lot on outdoor tourism, managed by professional guides – Island, Caving, Diving, River rafting etc. The USP of the company is inventory which is 80% unique. In total, they cater to 1400 unique experiences across 6 countries. Adventoro also has 200+ service providers out of which 100+ are from overseas.

The core team includes 5-6 employees of which 3-4 are full time members. Primarily, their target market is expatriates within SEA and the domestic group which is via the corporate layer.

Late last year, Adventoro raised about 200,000 + USD from Cradle/Azran Osman-Rani who is an an angel investor and Ching from iMoney.

The team has been fairly lean so far and has one core tech guy who is helping them to migrate from Shopify to proprietary platform. In addition, they also receive tech support from SEGNEL. The growth focus of Adventoro has been towards performance Marketing as the company spends a lot of on adwords. 50% of customers discover them via Google Ads followed by Facebook/Affiliates and organic SEO.

In a short span of time, Adventoro’s white paper on inclusive tourism was selected for World Tourism Forum as a startup for the finalist category. The aim of the World Tourism Forum Lucerne is to connect start-ups with the tourism, travel and hospitality industry – online and offline. On top of it, Adventoro was also selected for Alibaba Netpreneur Training program which provides selected local Malaysian entrepreneurs and business owners an opportunity to learn and explore how to harness digital technology to positively transform their businesses and the local economy. As a part of this program, Adventoro had an opportunity to be at Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China. More recently, Adventoro was one of the selected finalist startups in WIT Japan.

As they say, the journey of adventure travel has just got under way for Adventoro. There’s more to come!

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You mentioned TourPlus, works on a model where you have a fleet of over 1700+ driver-guides on board with you. Can you explain how have you drawn this network and how is it different from a traditional Grab model where a customer can avail similar services.

We partnered with MDEC on eRezeki to help local people and train them how to use our digital platform and app to get jobs. Beside, drivers also refer to their colleague and friends by word of mouth.

Grab is an on-demand services provided to customer, mean customer and driver required to turn on their app at the same time to book a driver or received a job. For Tourplus, we allow customers to book in advance for days or months. Another different is Grab driver job is a point to point transfer, for Tourplus, we are providing services as charter car, day tour or multiple days tour that guide will stick with 1 customer for the entire journey.

Many startups in the travel space, lure consumers by offering deep discounts – That’s not an area on which TourPlus focusses. What segment of the customers you’re targeting.

We are targeting last minutes customers, who have already arrived at the hotel and want to find something to do for rest of the day, hence we partnered with the hotel which allows hotel guest to book our services last minutes. Once customer booked our system will confirm the guide within 2 hours to the customer, mean customer can book on the morning 9 am and guide will be pickup customer at 11 am, this is the speed that no OTA or traditional agency can promise.

You mentioned Indonesia, Australia, Europe among some top markets. Despite having an English only version how do customers discover you?

We target customers from those countries who have a specific interest in our services, normally customers discover us from Google search keywords.

During the course of your startup’s journey, you seem to have seen it all. You raised funds, scaled up the operations and are now working on a lean model where the focus is on revenues and bottom-lines. Thoughts on that?

A lot of startup founders only think the grand vision of being an entrepreneur is like  Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and others who got famous and rich when their startups get funded and IPO or exits. In reality, startup is a business which in the long run is needed to self-sustain. Of course, getting funded or IPO is the capital strategy for a startup and that is why it is fun and challenging for entrepreneur, but bottom-line is if your startup is not generating revenue or has potential to scale to global level, no investor is willing to invest into your startup.

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In what can be termed one of the biggest travel startup funding news in Europe, German travel startup GetYourGuide has raised $500 million from Softbank. The latest funding values the startup which caters to over 35,000+ experiences at $1.78 billion. Earlier this month Skift had predicted in a news-story about GetYourGuide potentially raising $300 million funding from SoftBank and Singapore’s Temasek.

The startup has more than doubled the sales of tickets from 10 million in 2017 to 25 million in 2019. Founded by classmates Johannes, Tao, Martin, and Tobias in 2009, the platform gathers the best activities across the globe, all in one place.

April has been a hot month for tours & activities startups with Hong Kong-based Klook receiving a $225 million investment from SoftBank valuing it at over $1 billion.

According to Johannes Reck, “GetYourGuide has been the first digital company to start bringing a fragmented, decentralized, analogue global market online”.

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As we wind up 2018, here’s a look back at Indian travel startups that stole the limelight and attracted the attention of investors. While OYO has been the behemoth leading the funding round with focus towards overseas expansion, many other travel startups were in news for multiple fund injections.

Want to catch-up with the latest in travel tech? The Travel Technology Track is an annual initiative by TravHQ & OTM to build a knowledge sharing platform and showcase innovative cutting-edge technologies in the travel industry. Hosted in Mumbai in-line with OTM, the event aims to bring the thought-leaders and key decision makers of the travel industry under one roof to share best practices through insightful sessions and workshops. To participate click here.

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In picture, one of the happy customers of Ecohost

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Bamboo Lao from Luang Prabang, Lao PDR beat 111 competitors from across Southeast Asia to take top prize in the 2018 Mekong Innovative Startups in Tourism (MIST) challenge. The elite travel startup competition receives support from the Australian Government and the Asian Development Bank and counts Asia’s most prominent travel-specialized venture capitalists among its advisors. MIST’s top prize comes with a $10,000 USD innovation grant.

Bamboo Lao is on a mission to eliminate single use plastics from hotels and resorts across Asia. They have produced more than 80,000 reusable bamboo straws as well as other bamboo serving ware, using special breeds of bamboo and a proprietary natural treatment process. Their straws – which are in use in Aman Group, Pullman, Rosewood Group, and Sofitel properties, as well as on EXO Travel tours – have already displaced the use of more than 5,000,000 single use plastic straws.

All startups finish presentation

“The MIST innovation grant is money we desperately need in order to scale up production from one to three villages. We have received international orders for as many as 100,000 straws, and we must invest in the capacity to meet that kind of demand,” said BambooLao founder Arounothay Khoungkhakoune.

Vietnamese startup Ecohost took MIST’s second prize and received a $5,000 USD grant. Ecohost enables quality experiences in the Vietnamese countryside, working village-by-village to develop tours and activities while improving the capacity of rural homestays to serve international guests.

The two-year-old MIST program supports high-growth-potential emerging market startups in travel and hospitality – especially startups making a positive impact on communities, cultures, and the environment. The program’s five 2018 finalists completed a weeklong bootcamp on business fundamentals, received five months of coaching, and showcased their business models at four events: the MIST semi-finalist pitch competition in Ho Chi Minh City, June’s Mekong Tourism Forum (Nakhon Phanom, Thailand), a final investor pitch in Singapore, and the Mekong Travel Startup Forum at Singapore’s ITB-Asia travel trade fair.

Opening remarks by Jens Thraenharnt

“The Greater Mekong Subregion includes the fastest growing tourism destinations on earth, which creates enormous economic opportunity even as it places the region’s travel industry under unprecedented pressure to innovate. MIST’s uniqueness in the global travel industry is underscored by its winners Bamboo Lao and Ecohost. These entrepreneurs have risen to the challenge of innovating practical local solutions to real industry problems and needs,” said Jens Thraenhart, executive director of the Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office. The Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office administers MIST with the endorsement of the Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Viet Nam national tourism organizations.

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TUI Group has acquired Milan-based tours and activities startup Musement, which will initially be managed as an independent unit within TUI Destination Experiences, the group’s Spanish subsidiary.

With worldwide revenues of 150 billion euros (US$174.9 billion) and annual growth of seven per cent, the experiences market is one of the most attractive tourism segments, TUI said in a statement.

TUI said the tours and activities market of suppliers is still highly fragmented. More than 90 per cent of the around 350,000 companies are small providers generating annual revenues of less than one million euros, almost exclusively depending on one-off customers.

Image source: PhocusWire

Musement’s online platform serves these small companies by providing them with a digital marketplace – reaching out to 20 million TUI guests and as well as third party customers in future.

Founded five years ago, Musement today offers around 35,000 products in 1,100 cities around the world. Its portfolio ranges from admission tickets for museums, events and attractions via guided tours, to boat and bicycle tours. Musement has 130 employees and one million users.

With the acquisition, TUI expects earnings growth will be delivered through a broader product range and stronger digitalisation of the business. Customers will be able to create their own individual experiences from a range of products.

“We are aiming to provide the most highly personalised experiences possible to our 20 million customers. This will require a stronger digitalisation of our business. For me, digitalisation and personalisation are inextricably linked and constitute the key success factors for the future of tourism. With the acquisition of Musement, we are taking a further crucial step in this direction,” said Fritz Joussen, CEO, TUI Group.

Alongside Hotels & Resorts and Cruises, TUI Destination Experiences is one of TUI Group’s three growth areas. The company had only completed the merger with Hotelbeds Group’s Destination Management in August of this year. TUI Destination Experiences’ global footprint now comprises 49 countries, where the company employs its own staff and is among the leading providers of destination experiences.

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