Avail Discounts on Your Holiday Deals With TravelDisco.in
Travel Disco is an online travel portal that aims to provide users the best holiday deals from the best service providers inIndia. Travel Disco focuses only on holiday packages – domestic and international. The deals on Travel Disco primarily fall into three categories – Leisure holidays, Weekend Getaways and Adventure Treks and they shall continue to work in these directions only.Based out ofBangalore, the parent company of Travel Disco is Frappant Technologies Private Limited. Travel Disco was launched in January 2012 with over 25 deals from 16 vendors. Their focus on the Travel/Leisure domain and more specifically, Holiday Package deals is, according to them, their differentiating factor. “Further, with our deals against which users express interest, they bag deals and discounts without making any payment upfront. Also, unlike other deal portals, our involvement with the customer and the vendor does not end with the purchase of the voucher by the customer. We undertake the responsibility of connecting the customer to the vendor and arranging for the travel. We closely interact with the customer till the end of the tour,” says Founder, Sunil Prabhakar.
Business Model:
The Travel Disco business model is simple – they work with the vendor members and offer holiday packages at a discounted price. The deals posted are of two types: Deals that you can purchase directly by paying a small amount upfront; and Deals that you can express interest against (no payment required).
Once the user has completed the transaction (either purchasing or expressing interest), he/she is provided with a voucher that can be redeemed by contacting the vendor. The user bags the discounts promised on their portal. The remaining payments are to be made to the vendor directly.
In case the user wishes to customize a package or avail a package that is not available on their portal, they connect the user with their specialized vendor for the travel destination and thus satisfy the user’s requirement. Travel Disco also provides a B2B model, as part of which smaller travel agents can avail their deals and offer the same to their customers. The B2B model of the portal was introduced at the end of March 2012.
Target Audience:
Primarily, Travel Disco is targeting internet users in seven major cities inIndia, within 25 and 40 years of age, ideally with an annual income above 5 lpa. They believe there are approximately 20 million such users in the country. For the B2B side of their portal, they are targeting smaller agents currently involved in only flight/rail/bus ticket booking.
Their vendors are a mix of tour operators, resorts and hotels and are spread across the country. “Though we receive many proposals from various service providers, our idea is to maintain a minimum number of vendors while simultaneously covering as many travel destinations as possible. All our tour operators are specialized in organizing tours to specific destination(s) and provide services of the highest standards,” Sunil adds.
Starting up:
Sunil is a Computer Science engineer with a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from T. A. Pai Management Institute, Manipal with a specialization in Systems. He was employed with Tech Mahindra Limited, Pune for a period of over two years, prior to pursuing higher education.
Having worked on developing various business models, he finalized on Travel Disco. “We wanted a name that was catchy, unique and at the same time, depicted our idea. Hence, we finalized on Travel Disco, which essentially stands for ‘Travel Discounts,” says Sunil.
Currently, Travel Disco is a team of three – Pranav takes care of the technical aspects, while Nikita handles sales & marketing. They also employ technical and management interns on a regular basis.
Frappant Technologies is a self funded organization. They are currently investing in sales & marketing activities in order to increase awareness about the portal and build a customer base. They are also looking out for investors as they are seeking investment to take their venture to the next level by reaching out to more potential customers and enhancing the functionality of the portal.
The biggest challenge they have been facing is in the judicial allocation of their limited resources for spreading awareness about the portal. Also, the concept of deals and vouchers has always been associated with domains such as healthcare, spa etc. However, for travel, this is a fairly new concept and something the Indian traveler is not accustomed to. Making the customer understand the difference from a traditional travel portal and changing the perception is the greatest task for Travel Disco.
