Founders Kovid Kapoor and Rohit Shroff decided to develop Holidify when they realised there was a lack of comprehensive and useful information on the places to go.
Kapoor and Shroff are joined by Shashwat Kant who brings experience of working at Makemytrip and Kislay who works on marketing.
The India-based startup has just raised $100,000 in angel funding and says it is in talks to raise a larger round.
Holidify wants a slice of the online hotel and holiday business and says that in India alone, the total online market for hotels and holidays is more than $8 billion. The company wants to concentrate on India before global expansion.
While there are many online travel players, Holidify says holiday discovery is not given its "due attention and focus." It acknowledges players such asTripoto, HolidayIQ and Ixigo but says their product offerings are different.
With trust and standardization issues in India very few packages are sold online according to the startup. It says it is working on a model to solve this by connecting travellers with local travel agents via technology.
What problem does the business solve?
There is no good platform for discovering holiday ideas right now. The existing platforms might give a list of top places, but the list can never be relevant or useful for everyone.
Holiday ideas typically found on such platforms are not specific to users’ location or preferences and the options are also limited to only the popular places.
Holidify is a platform where a user can get all kind of holiday ideas including the offbeat ones based on his/her travel preferences. The holiday options are personalized and users could use filters to further improve suggestions.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
Since we started, our focus has shifted from web-only to mobile-first now. With smartphone penetration reaching new levels in India, phones are generally the first or only point of access for various platforms.
When we started, we were only providing information about various places, but now we have also started offering customized packages for a few places. Weekend Getaways as a concept is something that we had under-estimated earlier, but this is one of the most used features of our app and website.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Travel is at a nascent stage in India. It is more restrictive, as in catering to bookings for flights and hotels. While some companies and startups are consciously solving the problem of bookings, where to go for a vacation is mostly ignored.
By using Holidify, a user can gain insight into the discovery of a travel destination, in a more holistic way. People should use Holidify to look at a fresher set of options that they might not have known about earlier. People should use Holidify so that they can make a more informed decision about their travel plans. Now, people can also use Holidify to go for customized packages.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Word of mouth has been the strongest form of publicity for us with direct visitors increasing every month.
We have also done a bit of content marketing by publishing some really interesting blog posts and creative albums. Lots of them have gone viral on social media, some of them reaching 100,000 shares.
We have also done a bit of search engine optimisation since we are a content heavy platform. Overall, we are having around 500,000 users every month on our platform and it has increased over 10 times within 12 months.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years from now, we will be offering holidays from many more countries. We will also be able to strengthen our technology and partnerships to provide customizable holidays. We see ourselves as the leading travel planning company atleast in South East Asia in the next three years.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?
Information on travel on websites like TripAdvisor and Ixigo is crowd-sourced, making it raw and unstructured, and in many cases, largely unreliable. Also the information available is mostly only for popular places and there is a big gap between what users need and what is available.
Users end up spending hours on multiple platforms and still leave unsatisfied. Even with so many travel portals around the world, Google is still the first mode of search for most travel related queries. This is an obvious sign that it requires a startup like Holidify to improve travel planning.
What other technology company (in or outside of travel) would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We like how Zomato has solved discovery of restaurants. They also had a lean team initially and focussed on great content and user-experience from the very start. I think we have tried to do something similar for travel.
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup?
I am not sure about this. We are looking to build a sustainable, yet growing business here at Holidify. Customized holiday packages is a big enough business globally for us to scale and generate high revenues.
Describe your startup in three words?
Discover holiday ideas.
Tnooz view:
A holiday discovery platform is one thing and customized packages is another. Holidify is ambitious in first wanting to build up a really good content platform and then tackling the problem of online customised packages.
Maybe, just maybe, the reason no one has yet really been able to improve packages online beyond the mass market products is because it's still something better served offline.
Travel is a big, not to mention, emotional outlay for people every year and they're unlikely to part with cash unless they trust the provider and the experience is considerably better than they can get elsewhere.
In addition, customized packages often require something out of the ordinary and particular expertise in a destination.
Bringing local agents together with travellers is one way to bridge the gap but it opens up other issues such as how do you provide a consistent service as well as vet the individuals involved. It's not the first time the idea has been thought up.
Taking a slice of India's hotel and holiday market is a good place to start although India already has quite a few flight and hotel online specialists.
Holidify will be interesting to watch as it makes inroads into the Indian space and begins testing its platform for customised packages.
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