Online travel marketplace TravelTriangle has raised a $12 million Series C round led by Fundamentum.

The startup operates like a travel booking platform to allow holidaymakers to choose and secure their travel plans online. It also works with offline travel agents to help them offer services, such as tailoring a trip, to customers as they do when they walk into their offices in person. The company also offers a suite of back-office services designed for agencies to help bring them on to its platform and generate additional revenue.

The deal also marks the first investment from Fundamentum, a new $100 million fund established by Nandan Nilekani, one of the co-founders and former CEO of $33 billion IT services giant Infosys, and Helion Ventures partner Sanjeev Aggarwal.

Existing investors SAIF Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, RB investments and some angel investors also participated in the company’s Series C round.
In an interview to Economic Times, Nilekani said that Fundamentum evaluated more than 50 companies before deciding to back TravelTriangle, citing both the business opportunity in this segment as well as the team’s focus on frugality and unit economics.

“The Indian economy is going to become $6 trillion in ten years and there will be a huge middle class with spending power. The holiday travel market is going to grow very big,” Nilekani said.

“TravelTriangle has a unique approach of working with travel agents in a B2B2C model, which is not easy to replicate. What we also liked was the team is humble, open-minded and have a long-term vision,” he added. Ashish Kumar, partner at Fundamentum will join the TravelTriangle board.

Sankalp Agarwal, TravelTriangle’s CEO and one of three co-founders behind the business, mentioned that the money will be spent on product R&D, expanding to newer destinations as well as increasing brand visibility through marketing.

TravelTriangle closed a $10 million Series B in February 2017, and since then has seen its site traffic jump significantly from two million to 2.5 million per month. The startup has aggregated nearly 700 travel agents on its platform and services and services 60,000 customers for both international and domestic destinations.

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TravelTriangle has announced its partnership with Paytm to integrate its payment wallet on the website and mobile site. This would facilitate cashless payments on the go. The travellers would be able to leverage new age benefits of the new age payment options and continue with their faster buying experience.

Established in 2011 as an online holiday marketplace based out of Noida, Uttar Pradesh. The company is a brainchild of three IIT alumni- Sankalp Agarwal (IIT Kharagpur), Sanchit Garg (IIT Bombay), Prabhat Gupta (IIT Guwahati). TravelTriangle connects travellers with safe, reliable, local and verified holiday planners in various destinations around the world.

Commenting on the association, Abhinna Suresh Khare, AVP – Marketing, TravelTriangle, said, “Digital wallets deliver security and user experience to a traveller and is termed as the future of payments. The adoption has been a challenge due to the issue of trust but Paytm has successfully solved it – especially at a low ticket purchase. We at TravelTriangle believe that for any business, the micro-moment when a customer makes payment is the validation of their trust in the services, and with Paytm wallet we aim to deliver and further strengthen the offering to our customers. This tie up affirms our commitment to provide value to our customer experience.”

The company had raised Series A fund of $1.7 million from SAIF Partners in 2014. In April 2015, Silicon Valley venture fund Bessemer Venture Partners led an $8 million second financing round in TravelTriangle. And, since then, TravelTriangle has been growing at a rapid pace.

Adding more to the partnership, he said “As the most widely used mobile wallet in the country, Paytm’s integration with TravelTriangle will provide an established option of payment to the travellers booking holidays with us. Till now, the customers could pay only through EMI, Credit/Debit card and Net Banking. With the Paytm wallet integration we will be adding one more set of customers to our operations along with offering an additional means of payment to our existing and new customers. We are expanding as a service and are constantly improvising our offerings to take more such worthwhile strides in the future to make holiday planning easier for travellers.”

Offering value to its customers and to announce this partnership, Paytm and TravelTriangle have started the offer of 10% Cashback on its site for all trips booked during the tenure. So now travellers can enjoy extra benefits when they choose Paytm wallet as the payment option.

The USP of the company is its personalised approach, intelligent product and reliable fulfilment.In addition to this, the company has served 5 lakh travellers and reaches out to 60+ destinations & the happiness quotient is reflected in the 95.09% positive customer reviews.

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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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Online travel marketplace TravelTriangle recently surveyed its customers who booked international trips through the platform. They asked them to name the adventure activities that they would like to take up during their travel in the year 2016 and then put together a video of the activities that came out on top. The video was shared on their Facebook and YouTube and received much love from the followers.

If you are looking for some adventure activities for your next vacations, the video might give you some inspiration. Do check out the video below:

The video has already crossed over 87,000 views on the company’s Facebook page. Videos have emerged as one of the fastest growing formats for marketing and travel brands are increasingly putting more resources on creating inspirational videos.

You can check our list of 2015’s top travel industry YouTube videos here.

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Building a successful business isn’t easy. The road from having the idea to actually taking the plunge is tough and the journey beyond that is even tougher. Despite that, we learn about a large number of startups everyday, especially in the fast growing travel space. There are many entrepreneurs who choose to address the pain point of masses. While there are many unsuccessful entrepreneurs, there are some who set examples for others. They make mistakes, they learn from them, they improvise and they keep going.

We reached out to some of the travel industry entrepreneurs, who made news this year, to share the lessons from their journey so far. Here are some of them:

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, OYO Rooms

If there is one startup that stirred up the travel industry ecosystem this year, it has to be OYO Rooms. Ritesh Agarwal started his entrepreneurial journey at a very young age and went on to become the first Indian to win Thiel Fellowship. He started OYO Rooms to address the lack of quality hotel accommodation in India by offering predictable and affordable options. They have a network of hotels across 160 cities in India where they are offering great value to the travellers and the tourism ecosystem. This year, the budget hotel aggregator raised over USD 125 million funding and expanded fast enough to threaten some of the biggest names in the industry.

He shared, “In 2015, we learnt from experience that if you can showcase demonstrable benefits to business-owners, and utilize technology to manage everyday business problems, even a legacy industry such as Hotels can be modernized. In over 4000 hotels across India, hotel-owners use our business apps to manage inventory, revenue and CRM.

Lastly, it is critical to build a great team and stay agile. Our hyper-growth coupled with strong unit-economics would not have been possible were it not for diligent operations focus executed by high-quality talent.”

Yogendra Vauspal, Founder, Stayzilla

Yogendra is another entrepreneur who started his journey at a very young age. He started with various web and e-commerce projects after dropping out of engineering at the age of 19. As he went deeper into this space, he went on to launch an e-commerce portal of his own. Eventually he launched the accommodation portal Stayzilla. With the message ‘Make room for something new’, this year Stayzilla shifted focus to homestays and other form of alternative stays.

Talking about his learning from the same, Yogendra said, “Indians are not really closed minded or fragmented by various lines of preference as we like to believe. We are witnessing a beautiful expression of opening up homes or extra rooms for a variety of demographics and an ease with which homeowners have adopted the concept. Although they can select at deeper levels on basis language and food habits, we are seeing the selections happening at a very broad level of traveller type and there is a larger openness in the people than we actually believe exists. Indian homeowners are much more open when it comes to hosting guests and I believe this was the biggest learning of 2015 for us at Stayzilla.”

Sankalp Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, TravelTriangle

With entrepreneurship in his blood, Sankalp Agarwal is the co-founder of TravelTriangle, India’s first full-stack holiday marketplace. At TravelTriangle, he leads the company vision and is intrinsically involved in fundraising, business growth & creating a world class team. He held a lucrative post at Adobe before his own entrepreneurial venture. His innovative nature led him to tackle various technological gaps in day to day life during his college days and he is trying to do something similar for travellers with TravelTriangle.

Emphasising the right growth strategy for a startup, he said, “For a business the first and foremost thing is to chase 100 fans. In the category having 100 fans who will talk about you is way better than having 1 million people liking you. As for a startup- look at the growth in this way. One starts from the garage moves on to a small office which leads to a tribe of followers converting into a village and eventually a nation. When you are in garage phase you have to invest in the product, relentlessly pursue the product till there is traction and as you move into a small office get the generalist and right product market fit people. Once you move to a tribe format you will need specialist like Marketing- HR function to take care of your business. It’s a constant process of evolution which comes through growing with right intent.”

Gautam Shewakramani, Founder & CEO, AudioCompass

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Gautam did his undergrad in Computer Science and Film and then went on to business school at MIT Sloan in Boston. After moving back to his home, he spent some time actively working with and seed investing in startups and that is when he got inspired to start AudioCompass. AudioCompass offers audio guidebooks for a large number of tourist attractions through a very simple mobile app. This year AudioCompass expanded to Oman and also won the Start Tel Aviv award.

Highlighting the importance of business associations, Gautam said, “One of the biggest challenges for us in building AudioCompass has been convincing some of the legacy travel industry players that customers are ready for change. In travel, change has been demand driven, i.e. consumers are demanding change before suppliers are offering it. AudioCompass’ early success and validation has come from the fact that we saw a gap and anticipated the consumer need of wanting to be empowered while traveling.”

Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO, Fxkart.com

Exchanging money is a hassle in India and there is a lack of information about the processes and formalities. Dr. Mushtaq Shah, who was head of research for Equinox Capital Management, founded Fxkart after facing the problem dealing with individual Forex dealers during his frequent international trips. After founding Fxkart, he got Abdul Hadi Shaikh on-board as CEO. Abdul was the head of research at Ratings Intelligence, an ethical investment advisory firm in London before joining Fxkart. After the launch this year, Fxkart was quick to introduce a mobile app and partner with AirAsia.

Speaking from his experience of building a marketplace business, Abdul Hadi Shaikh said, “As an aggregator our biggest challenge was to work on both sides of the business. We thought that enabling tech for the dealers would be the easier part but we really had to swim against the tide to get 650+ dealer locations while the customers adopted quickly. That was something we didn’t expect but that was ground reality. Learning – Assumptions are good but they are not necessarily the right way”

Sidharth Gupta, Co-Founder, Treebo Hotels

The budget hotel industry has seen lot of activity this year and another startup that stood out in this space is Treebo Hotels. Treebo Hotels officially started in June and raised series A funds from Matrix and SAIF Partners in June itself, making it one of the fastest series A fund raised by a tech startup since inception. The co-founder Sidharth comes with a very strong educational background and has worked with McKinsey and Company for years before joining hands with Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain to start Treebo Hotels.

Focusing on the value offered by a startup, Sidharth said, “In the current heady environment it’s easy for new entrepreneurs to be misled into doing a lot of jazzy things, quickly. It’s also easy for them to believe that funding and PR are their given rights! But I think founders need to first ask themselves the question – ‘What is our single biggest value addition to the customer’s life?’ ‘What is our reason for existence?’ ‘What is our core?’. They must develop clarity on this, and then relentlessly work on offering this value to the customer over and over again. Once you get this right everything else – growth, funding, revenue, PR, etc. – will follow”

Benny Kao, Co-Founder, TripVerse

Benny has always been fascinated with technology and how it changes the world. He holds experience of working with some big names in the industry. Being an avid traveller, he often faced problem managing his trips with the existing tools which inspired him to start TripVerse. TripVerse allows travellers to discover authentic user generated trip ideas and create their own itineraries to keep them informed even offline. Recently the startup was selected to be a part of Amadeus’ travel startup initiative Amadeus Next.

Emphasising the importance of simplifying user experience, Benny said, “With so much information available on the internet, travel planning isn’t really easier and simpler than before. The information overload we have today might have made travel planning a more lengthy process. I believe true value lies in presenting travellers information that is relevant and actionable”

Kunal Jain, Co-Founder, Your Local Cousin

It isn’t easy to plan activities for your trip when you are travelling there for the first time. The problem takes another scale, especially when you are travelling to an international destination. This inspired Kunal to start Your Local Cousin. It is a peer to peer service which connects travellers to a local expert and as travellers look for the human connect in travel, such services are picking up fast. This allows them to explore like a local and not like a tourist.

Kunal emphasised on the importance of networking and said, “Sitting behind your laptop and plugging away all day is not a healthy way to build a startup / business. You should get out, meet people and have a social life and the sooner you figure this out the better you’ll think and perform mentally”

You can also download our list of travel industry predictions by industry experts for the year 2016 here.

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Technology, no matter how cutting edge, finds value only when it makes a difference in the lives of people.

Fortunately, travel industry is witnessing a quality surge of applied technology which is optimizing  right from planning,  customizing and finalizing travel, it is also making the jobs of millions of people (travel industry is the largest employer in the world) more fulfilling and better paying.

Internet has brought one of the biggest revolution in industry. Earlier while travelers depended on brochures and third party information on destinations (especially foreign) and other things related to itinerary, now people go online and search for themselves, more often than not from trusted and official sources. According to a Google finding, 78% holiday travelers used internet for destination research.

Internet is also helping in bridging the demand and supply gap. Couple of years back, there were quality agents who provided super value on the packages they provided. Problem was, they were not using the internet to connect with travelers browsing online. The traveler picked up inflated packages.  TravelTriangle, the first mover in the online holiday marketplace was the first entrant. We have now helped travel agents who were earning a couple of thousand rupees a month to scaling up their businesses 100X.

Prabhat Gupta, Co-Founder & CTO, Travel Triangle

India is today 3rd largest smartphone market in the world and will have 314million mobile internet users by 2017. This means more value and customization both for travelers as well as travel agents.

The mobile internet also means Apps. An app is even more convenient method than a website and is accessible anytime. With weekend getaways on the way of becoming impulse buy, App will play a bigger role in holiday planning.

A Google map today ensures that you are not lost in a new place and your mobile wallet ensures that you don’t have to worry about the cash and card you carry on your holidays.

To sum it up, technology is making travel easier, faster and more convenient and it will get better with time.

Author: Prabhat Gupta is the Co-Founder and CTO of TravelTriangle. An IIT graduate, Prabhat comes with experience of working with big technology brands like Oracle before he joined hands with other co-founders to start TravelTriangle. TravelTriangle offers customised tour packages to customers with the help of multiple local travel agents.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect views of TravHQ.

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We have just come back from two exciting days of learning new things and meeting interesting people at the eTailing and Travel Commerce Conference. Renowned industry leaders shared their experiences of building their businesses, experts from different domains discussed the hottest trends and some new innovative startups also came into light. It surely was a great event for all travel marketers and industry analysts to discuss key challenges our industry faces.

Here is an overview of the major points that emerged:

1. Experiential tours and P2P services will grow

According to Dr. Suman Billa, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, we will see a strong growth in the number of people looking for bespoke tours. Technology will help fuel the growth and give more opportunities to smaller players. P2P services like Airbnb are expected to grow as well.

Businesses catering to defined niche like student travellers or solo female travellers will have a lot of scope in the future. A representative of a major OTA emphasised that brands like them won’t consider offering services for a specific group. It isn’t possible at their scale and the segment can be better served by small businesses specifically doing the same, so that is a space new players can explore.

Dr. Suman Billa, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Tourism addressing the audience

2. Weak players will fade away

Mr. G. Shankaran Nair, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Servion Global Solutions said that the model on which ecommerce companies are operating isn’t a sustainable one. Price is the only differentiating factor between many of them. Competing in a rapidly evolving market only on the basis of price won’t work for long and will lead to a shakedown wiping out the weak players from the market.

3. Selling packages isn’t the best idea

Of course it will be a different story for a businesses like TravelTriangle or WeAreHolidays that specialise in selling packages but the major OTAs aren’t keen to do the same. According to them, it is better to simplify the booking process and let the customer take care of things. Screen sizes and attention spans are going down and it might not be a very good idea to present a complicated itinerary.

4. Scalable technology is necessary for global expansion

Expedia is present across a dozen of countries and according to Mr. Madhur Arora, Head of e-Commerce Business, India and Thailand, Expedia manages to serve all the countries from one location. Having a scalable product allows the brand to quickly start operating in new market rather than having to start fresh.

5. ROI on Social Media is a tough nut to crack

During a discussion about how social media drives digital conversations in the hospitality industry, Mr. Hari Nair, Founder & CEO, HolidayIQ suggested that it is best to use social media to inspire people to travel. The inspiration might not have an immediate impact but it will eventually turn into a conversion for the brand. Brands aren’t able to see any significant return on their social media efforts because there is a huge gap between the time a brand takes to inspire a traveller and the time when he or she actually books with them. It is possible that a booking is coming through social media but the credit is going to another channel.

The eTailing and Travel Commerce Conference was surely a great experience for us. Did you attend the event? We would love to hear your feedback.

Update: You can see pictures from the event on TravHQ Facebook page

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