Elan Adventures: A Startup in the Online Adventure Trip Planning Space
Elan Adventures is a platform where outdoor enthusiasts can communicate, cooperate and collaborate with each other to share important information and unique experiences. They can post their photographs, maps, videos and other important information which help others immensely in trip planning. Through a well managed network of skilled and trusted local guides Elan helps you in planning and managing your trip for the best price, maximum comfort and unlimited fun.
Elan means passionate enthusiasm or a feeling of strong eagerness (usually in favor of a person or cause).
Prashant and Ritesh are the co-founders, Nrupul is the CTO and Shashank looks after Marketing & Finance. As they are a startup, these are not very defined roles and one has to do anything that comes up. Ritesh states “Our team is well balanced with me and Shashank having some corporate experience in the consulting and financial sector before we took the plunge.” Nrupul and Prashant have worked with start-ups and know the start-up culture very well. They also have a ground team that takes care of operations with the help of whom it is possible to run day to day operations.
“At Elan Adventures we are trying to solve three main problems. First being the lack of information regarding Adventure and Offbeat travel in India. Secondly we are trying to make adventure sports accessible to every individual by providing best prices and experience. Third we are solving the travellers’ problem by providing customized unique experiences rather than standard ‘packages’. There was a difficult customer who wanted to do trekking, rafting, mountain biking and bungy jumping in a single trip in just 5 days. It was an interesting trip to plan and execute in the end,” says Ritesh.
“We have been travelling ourselves for quite some time now. While trying to plan our trip we always felt a need for a website with better information and an enhanced user interface. Most of the sites in India don’t work on their UI at all, although users have started to really care about it. So we made our travel portal as you may say to solve the problems arising from these changing trends,” says Prashant.
The revenue mainly streams in through the trips that are booked on the website. They get a large number of queries each day through the website. The response has been good so far and they are growing at a very good pace.
Elan adventure has faced a unique challenge. It is that of convincing people that adventure sports are for everyone. They have observed some people being scared at the very thought of it and avoid trying it out. They have managed to change that trend by introducing individuals to easier activities and then gradually assisting them to take up challenging expeditions.
They are planning a lot of new features that aim to solve the trip planning problems of the user and help the operator reach out to the customers with quality offerings.
Planning a trip over the coming holidays? Do check out Elan Adventures! For other interesting startups in the travel space, visit mygola, tushky, The Blueberry Trails, JoGuru and Touristlink.
Also, check out some websites offering adventure sports! Travelmob, a travel portal recently got funded.
