Travel portal, HolidayIQ to Invest Fresh Funds in Talent, Product Development and Marketing

Tuesday February 12, 2013 , 3 min Read

Bangalore based HolidayIQ – a travel information portal recently received funding from Tiger Global Management LLC and Accel Partners. Hari Nair, founder & CEO, HolidayIQ refused to disclose the actual amount of funding received, however he spoke to YourStory.in about his plans for HolidayIQ with the fresh round of funding. “Most of the investment will be used in marketing. We also have plans to upgrade our product and increase content that our site generates for domestic travel,” said Hari.

hari_nair — HolidayIQ gives its users customized information and insights on places, hotels, sightseeing and transport for various locations within India. With this round of funding there is will also be a focus to generate relevant content for Indian travelers going abroad. “So if an Indian is travelling to Japan, we will have information on our site that will be useful for an Indian. Where to eat, where to live, what to see and such,” explains Hari. With over 10 lakh members, HolidayIQ is the largest travel community in India. In the last eight months, the number of visitors to the site has gone up from 1.2 million viewers to 4.5 million viewers (per month) says Hari.

HolidayIQ has been testing its app over the last four months and have todate been downloaded 25,000 times. Apart from mobile phone, to engage better with travelers, two months ago HolidayIQ launched a program called ‘hiq!Pad’ across hotels in India. The hiq!Pad initiative aims to collect customer feedback in real-time from customers when they are staying in a hotel. A simple set of questions is posed to the consumer -- that can be answered in less than five minutes -- and he/she can enter his feedback about the hotel while they are still there. Feedback collected in this way is then also uploaded on the HolidayIQ site for the benefit of their larger travel community. Today about 200 hotels participate in this initiative by HolidayIQ and according to Hari feedback collected through this method has been very effective.

Besides funding, HolidayIQ also de-merged with one of its partners from 2010 – Wego Pte from Singapore. Wego is a technology company that helps HolidayIQ users to compare prices of different travel agents in a particular location that the traveler maybe visiting. While HolidayIQ will continue using the Wego software, the business relationship that they had earlier has now been changed to deal with the changing face of HolidayIQ in India.

Website: HolidayIQ

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