If you have been following the viral video feats of travel search engine, ixigo, the name Aashish Chopra doesn’t need a second introduction. Be it getting recognised for the most shared brand post on Facebook in Asia or winning the DMAi Content Marketer Of The Year Award, he has done it all.

We recently spoke to him on the opportunities for content marketers and the changing face of Digital India. Here’s a short video from our conversation with Aashish Chopra. To learn more about him, visit his personal website http://www.aashishchopra.com/.

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With so many travel providers, travellers now have multiple sources to buy their tour packages. They can go to the conventional agents and let them come back to them with a customised package or they can go to the many websites online and buy one of the many packages on offer. But each one of them comes with its own limitation. Offline providers will take longer to offer you a customised package and every revision will add more days to it while the packages you can buy online usually don’t offer much freedom.

Tripovo offers travellers a platform to personalise and book tour packages online. Travellers are able to customise an itinerary from a list of suggested itineraries, curated by the Tripovo team. The platform allows travellers to change or add transfers, activities and hotels to create a personalised tour package. Flights are not currently offered. The items are taken from third-party APIs so the traveller is able to see live prices and availability with the ability to book their package online. Here is a short video of Tripovo co-founder Steven Wong explaining the product:

The two founders, Steven Wong and Hannah Pearson, began working full-time on the travel platform in September of this year. Tripovo‘s Beta version was launched on the 1st of November. So far, over 250 personalised itineraries has been created by potential travellers, with Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul being the most popular cities.

“Tour packages, where the traveller has multiple components in one booking – transfers, hotels and tours – are growing in popularity amongst Asian travellers,” said Steven Wong, co-founder of Tripovo. “From working in a travel agency, we saw the travellers’ desire to personalise their travel experience but the manual process took a long time.”

Using their experience from working in a traditional travel agency, the two founders saw a need from the market to improve the tour package booking experience.

Tripovo aims to bridge the gap between a traditional and online travel agent. They offer the high customer touch point and curated experience that traditional travel agents excel at, but with the convenience of showing live prices to satisfy the instant gratification generation.

Currently Tripovo offers packages to 6 countries in Asia Pacific, with plans to offer more packages in more cities in those countries by the end of the year. European and American tours will be offered next year. You can view the packages on offer and personalise them on their beta platform at http://www.tripovo.com.

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Last month during TravelRave, we came across many interesting travel startups from the region. One of them was Tourplus from Malaysia. Tourplus offers a platform for travellers to find expert local guides to explore a destination and also check itineraries created by others to see what places they are exploring.

The attractions included in the itinerary are listed along with their TripAdvisor rating to give an added assurance to the travellers. The website interface is simple and you can easily look up attractions that other travellers have recommended. Like we mentioned, users can book a private tour guide through the website and if they are a local expert, they can also register as a tour guide and help travellers explore their city.

We had a chat with Kyle Foo, Co-Founder of Tourplus. Here is a short video of him explaining why the travellers needed Tourplus:

You can try Tourplus to check out the itineraries by other travellers or to find a tour guide for your next trip. Visit them on www.tourplus.my.

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We are so used to having internet on our mobile devices that we feel helpless without it. While travelling outside country borders, it becomes a major problem as roaming costs can be sky high. During the WIT Bootcamp, we came across a startup Rimoto which is trying to solve this by offering users free access to some useful apps while you are travelling.

Shashin Shah, one of the co-founders of Rimoto presented the idea during the Start-up pitch during WIT Bootcamp and won during the final round on October 21. Here is a short video of Shashin introducing Rimoto to the TravHQ community.

To provide the service, Rimoto partners with various mobile operators and buys data in bulk to offer free access to partner apps through VPN. The apps are mostly services like restaurant reservation, cabs and ticket booking that people primarily need while travelling. Users can also choose to have internet access for more apps like Facebook and Whatsapp if they choose to pay for a premium plan.

Shashin presenting Rimoto during WIT Bootcamp

You can know more about Rimoto on their website here. To read other stories from TravelRave, you can click here.

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Try finding quality accommodation on a low budget and chances are you will be lost in the maze of results which a search engine like Google will throw up. The highly fragmented budget hotel segment is at war and you have all kind of players vying in for the attention of the customer.

You know what you are booking in case of a flights, trains or high end luxury hotels but with the highly fragmented budget hotel industry, you really don’t know what to expect. The problem isn’t lack of options but an overly crowded segment. The reviews you find on OTAs and metasearch websites like TripAdvisor help to some extent but only in case of destinations that are frequented by travellers. In case of Tier2 and Tier3 cities, the problem magnifies to another level. Hotel chains that invest in their own properties stay away from these cities because of the low ROI and it is hard to find reviews for the hotels that are already present there.

Vista Rooms is a budget hotel aggregator offering rebranded and standardised hotel rooms

Earlier this year during SATTE Mumbai West, we met a new hotel chain aggregator called Vista Rooms. Similar to other hotel chains that have come up recently, they partner with individual hotel properties, standardise them and offer them tools & support to provide high quality accommodation at low prices. However the biggest differentiator lies in their approach. While most other chains are investing heavily in metro cities, they are focusing primarily on Tier2 and Tier3 cities where there are hardly any quality budget hotels.

We got a chance to have a conversation with Ankita Sheth, one of the co-founders of Vista Rooms and she shared Vista Rooms’ vision with us.

You can book a stay for your next vacation with Vista Rooms here. You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter for more updates and attractive offers.

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Last month, we met Sam Amrani at the RISE Summit in HK and had a quick chat with him on the usage of beacons in the travel industry. Sam, who is the executive chairman at Tamoco, a London based leader in mobile proximity technology and analytics had some interesting insights on how he thinks the beacons will shape up the future of travel. We think beacons are going to be big in this part of the world and we should see a wide-scale adoption from airports to hotels in the coming days. There is an initial awareness challenge that the industry faces that can be potentially overcome with some adoption stories of beacons and how they’ve been used across different verticals.

Here is a short video of our conversation with Sam Amrani from our series TravHQ Talks. To watch out our other video stories, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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