Holidayen Will Create Your Travel Itinerary In Minutes! Planning a Travel, especially if it is an unknown city or destination, is probably one of the most difficult aspect a traveler has to go through before he ventures out. Poorly planned travels can cost you not only the fun, but may end up burning a deep hole in your pocket when you are at a foreign destination. I recently came across Holidayen, an online platform that will help you plan your perfect holiday in matter of minutes. We tried using the platform and found it quite intuitive and easy to use. Holidayen has basically aggregated list of popular destinations across the world. The traveler just needs to enter the name of the city and give parameters like number of days, date, activities they are interested, kind of hotel they want to live in etc. Based on this, Holidayen comes up with entire itinerary full properly scheduled activities pinned on maps! We spoke to Holidayen Founder Tarun Madan, to know more about the platform. Here are the excerpts. How did you get an idea to build Holidayen? When did you start building this product? Where is the startup located? I have been an avid traveler and had faced the pain of planning a trip on several occasions. Usually, I had to look up several online resources, guide books, find and consult people who had been there earlier, and shortlist what would be of personal interest to me. As a traveler, I yearned for a simpler and quicker way of planning an entire trip. As part of Texas Venture Labs, an Entrepreneurship course at the University of Texas at Austin, I validated the market and idea. I surveyed 200 travelers, most of whom found the entire trip planning experience stressful and time consuming. Based on this, I started building the product in the second half of 2012 after deciding on partnerships with Expedia and Viator for hotels and activities bookings. We launched our beta in March 2013 and after a series of feedback rounds with early users, publicly launched the website in July. I am located in New York, while a bulk of product development work gets done through our interns in India. 2) How many destinations / cities are you covering currently? We currently cover 30 international destinations, which collectively account for about 20% of total international tourist traffic. We have mobile apps for 28 destinations for trip planning on the go. We aim to expand this number to 100 by the end of this year. 3) With so many travel related platforms already available, including some of the real big ones, Do you think Holidayen can create a market for itself? While it is not incorrect to say that the market is flooded with a number of travel related platforms, it is also reasonably correct to say that the market is highly fragmented and there is no clear winner, especially in the case of travel planning and destination research for sights, activities and tours. Our research and analysis on current competition shows that we are currently one of the few fully automatic trip planning services and the only fully automatic service for a number of destinations. We are also one of the early entrants in Mobile app space, distinguishing us from our competitors. 4) How do you plan to monetize the site? We offer booking services for hotels and a wide variety of activities through our website. This is in partnership with Viator and Expedia, which are two of the most trusted brands for travel related bookings. We are also planning to monetize through our mobile apps, which we have just begun rolling out on the Android Play Store. 5) Future roadmap? We plan to scale up swiftly to include more destinations, and also expand the range of our recommendations to include other aspects such as events and restaurants to make complete plans. We endeavor to help travelers have memorable holidays, and all upcoming features are designed to ensure that users have the best experience possible.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:27:56 +0000
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