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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Treebo Hotels, a tech-enabled budget hotel brand based in Bangalore, has recently announced the launch of Treebo Alpha, an exclusive offering developed to cater to the needs of corporate travellers. This offering includes multiple benefits like free office pickups and drops, personal 4G dongles, complimentary laundry service and free evening snacks.

Elaborating on this business development, Sidharth Gupta, the co-founder of Treebo Hotels, quoted:

“The demand for Alpha has come directly from our corporate partners. We conducted a survey with our 200 strong institutional client base to understand how their needs differed from the leisure traveller. They have already been using the base Treebo offering with clean rooms, assured essentials and prompt service extensively. But given their hectic work-travel schedules and long periods of staying away from home, they also have some specialized requirements to help them stay efficient and comfortable at the same time. Alpha has been designed keeping these requirements in mind.”

Commenting on the behavior of corporate travellers, he stated:

“What’s interesting is that clients are willing to pay a little extra for these additional benefits. Alpha has therefore been priced at a premium, with rooms starting Rs 1999 per night. This is consistent with Treebo’s approach of offering a high quality experience to all types of travellers rather than only using discounts to target them.”

Currently, Treebo Hotels is operating at around 75% occupancy across hotels every day. With the launch of ‘Treebo Alpha, the brand aims to grow its share in the business travel segment, which comprises 40% of the budget travel and hospitality segment.

Another player in this space, ZO Rooms launched Zo Prime – a premium offering apart from the budget offering. Alpha by Treebo Hotels will go against the likes of ZO Prime and OYO Premium. The ZO Rooms properties listed under Prime offer features like airport transfers and foreign exchange over other ZO properties.

The Indian travel market has witnessed a growing demand of hotel budget aggregators over the past few months. They are challenging the conventional budget and mid-market chain’s businesses and have already started to create waves in the hotel industry.

Founded in March this year by IIT alumni Sidharth Gupta, Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain, Treebo was formerly known as ‘Zipotel’. It has a network of 45 hotels across 9 cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai.

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The Travel & Tourism industry has seen a huge surge in the past few years and things have gained even more momentum this year. Innovative startups are coming up in this space and scaling at a rapid pace. We have also witnessed some major acquisitions like TaxiForSure by Ola and Mygola by MakeMyTrip. Local investors that were dormant until now have joined the game to further heat up things in this segment. The investments grew by over 50 percent in the second quarter of the year as compared to the first quarter.

Here is an exclusive infographic by TravHQ which consolidates some travel startup investments that have made the news in 2015. There are some startups in the list who haven’t disclosed the amount, but the experts can predict the range by looking at their categories, funding source and observing similar other investments.

Budget stays

This segment has seen the most action this year and according to industry experts, we will see a lot more activity in budget stays in the coming months. Finding quality budget stays was a major challenge for travellers in India and these startups seem to  be addressing the issue. While most of the inclusions are budget hotel chains like OYO Rooms, Zo Rooms, Treebo Hotels, FabHotels and Wudstay, Stayzilla operates as a platform for individual hotels as well as alternative stays.

Trip Planning

These services help you plan your travel by offering multiple itineraries or tools that can help you create your own. This is another industry segment that might see more players though growth is limited by the high dependence on community and limited monetisation opportunities here. Trip Hobo and Tripoto are two startups that help you discover itineraries of other people and help you plan your own vacations.

In-destination services

These services come in handy when you are travelling or have reached your destination. It isn’t exactly the hottest segment right now but with newer technologies entering the scene, it will gain momentum very soon. Guidoo and Trip38 are two very different startups that wiill help you in your travel. Guidoo allows you to explore destination with audio visual guides and offers the option to book local activities. Trip38 manages the itinerary in one place after you have got the bookings done via a booking service. It also offers the option of booking local activities similar to Guidoo.

Marketplace/ Travel search

Travel marketplaces are still evolving in India and are slowly gaining traction. Portals like Travel Triangle, Trip Factory or iTraveller leverage technology to capture customer preferences and offer a better tailored package for them. Travel search engine ixigo also saw investments this year while they are working to ramp up their services and increase the focus on mobile.

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