Startup pitch: Tripshelf's package holiday meta for India has $250K to get going

Metasearch or price comparison sites have come a long way since the early days of Kayak, Travelsupermarket, Trivago and the other early adopters.

The suppliers' relationship with the price comparison industry has also changed, from adversarial to accepting.

Comparing the price of what is basically the same thing - a seat on the same flight or a room in at the same hotel - is the most utilitarian example to what metas can do.

But they do have the capacity to "add value" to both suppliers and travellers when they are tasked with comparing  more complicated products, such as a package holiday, and on categories other than price.

This is where Tripshelf comes in. It is a marketplace for package tours - suppliers share their inventory with the site, which structures the data in a way that makes it possible to compare deals easier in a single screen.

The click-through goes directly to the supplier's own site.

Tripshelf has been live since its pre-Series A funding round this March.

Before the Q&A with its co-founder Jai Raj Gupta, here's a sixty-second introductory video.

What problem does your business solve?

About two years back I was planning a family holiday to Egypt and went online to look for holiday packages. Six days of research, 24 websites and 30 packages later I was more confused as each tour operator had its own template.  I was not able to compare the options in a way that allowed me to make the best choice.

Tripshelf will address this difficulty in comparing packages. It is an an online marketplace for leisure travellers to discover, compare and buy the best holiday packages from unlimited tour operators, each listed under their own brand name.

We are a marketplace aggregator and not a OTA or niche service provider.

Tripshelf is the only service of its kind in India which helps travellers fulfil this need.

From a demand perspective, the problem is frustration - 80% of consumers shopping for travel online look at more than 15 websites before deciding and there is no standard to compare services.

Some 50 million travellers in India alone have this pain every year, which creates a billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can make this process easier.

There are issues on the supply side as well. There are 5,500 registered travel operators who've spent decades giving people excellent holidays, often with better service and at a better price than the OTAs, yet customers can't find them. This is due to lack of financial muscle, lack of technology capabilities and lack of digital marketing expertise. Tripshelf can help these operators get their product in front of customers.

Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff? We have an eclectic mix of youth and experience amongst our team of ten.

Jai Raj Gupta (centre) - founder & chief executive Also CEO for wedding management services company, Shaadionline.com, which was set up some 15 years ago and is now managed by the team. He provides strategic, marketing and financial direction to the company.

Dhruv Gupta (right) - founder Set up Seeksherpa a few years ago and is now full-time on Tripshelf. Prior to this he spent more than two years with Google (San Francisco, India, Singapore). He leads technology and digital marketing for Tripshelf.

Sukhmani Singh (left) - founder Set up Seeksherpa a few years ago and is now full-time on Tripshelf. She previously spent more than two years with AT Kearney's communications, media and technology practice, working across APAC. She leads supply partnerships and user experience design.

Funding arrangements?

Tripshelf is a pre-Series A funded company. It is backed by Delhi based GEMS Group. GEMS is an early stage fund, servicing companies that are customer-centric and leverage technology as a scale multiplying factor. GEMS invested $250,000 at an undisclosed valuation. This money will be used to establish traction with the customer and travel operator community.

Revenue model?

• Listing fee for travel agents
• Booking fees for converted queries
• Onsite advertising
• Special promotions and launches for travel operators

Many Indian travellers are considering longer domestic trips and international destinations, where decisions are more fraught with uncertainty. Tripshelf offers them the perfect comparison engine for online travel shopping, and at no cost to the customer.

Our revenue model requires suppliers whose services are being booked to pay a small percentage to Tripshelf.

So as long as we can drive traffic and consumers to enquire, it’s a win-win situation for all.

External validation?

• Promoter strength and leverage

This gives us domain expertise, offline business knowledge and allows us credibility with the travel operator community, key to getting them on board

• Business traction

Currently the website generates more than 300 leads a day on average, with each lead going directly to the individual operators.

Tnooz view:

Anything which makes searching for travel  easier is to be welcomed, and Tripshelf thinks that it has found a way to connect supply from the industry and demand from consumers. The biggest headwind for Tripshelf is the entirely unpredictable question  around customer acquisition. However technically competent the site, however intuitive its design and however tempting the deals from suppliers are, without actual customers there is no business. Jai Gupta agrees, saying that "travel consumer acquisition is tough because consumer decision-making is scattered and there is a lot of pogo sticking across sites." He thinks that "a market place model such as ours has to go viral for increased usage" and that Facebook will be its primary engagement tool. Gupta is also interested in video as a customer acquisition tool and said that there will also be an offline campaign launched in a few months, with radio an important channel. In India at the moment, all the major players in the marketplace are making a land-grab for clients - MakeMyTrip has repeatedly said that its current focus is customer acquisition and is not afraid to incentivise new users with big discounts for first-time app purchases. It also has the finance and backing to take the losses that this land-grab for users is generating. Any consumer-facing site has a battle on its hands getting in front of travellers, unless it has a huge marketing budget or internal resources devoted to SEO and social marketing. Founder Dhruv Gupta's experience at Google will help out here. India is already a big travel market, and has everything in place to grow. It operates at such a scale that even a relatively low market awareness can generate enough revenue to run a viable business. Whether or not Tripshelf can become the go-to package holiday comparison site for the Indian market remains to be seen, but it has had a strong start, its team and backers have experience of the Indian market and Indians are getting more adventurous in their travel choices. But the dealbreaker for the site, and in this Tripshelf not alone, is customer acquisition. If it can crack that conundrum, it could become an established player in India's growing online travel market.

Share this quote