A failed startup, backpacking trip and starting up again
Himanshu Singh had completed his bachelor’s degree and started working with Oracle Financial Services in 2006, what was for many a dream job. But within three years, ennui caught up with him and in October 2009, he started up a strategy consulting firm with a couple of others. They tried hard but the company died a slow painful death.
Failure is never easy to take and Himanshu decided to go on a backpacking trip to find himself back. Getting a new perspective and following his long lived passion of traveling, Himanshu decided to pursue it full time and decided to startup again. He got together with Devashish Chaudhary and Preetam Pandey, and TravelTigerTrack was the result. "In that one year, I traveled through forests, spent a month with a tribal community and lived on a lonely island apart from the regular trekking and camping," says Himanshu. Traveling and startups both give him a sense of freedom, and he has combined them to make it a way of life.
In essence, TTT provides services for various types of travels focusing on wildlife, adventure, culture, trekking, camping etc. They are a team of 7 members with their offices at 2 locations – Head office at Corbett City Ramnagar in Uttrakhand and other one in New Delhi. They have planned tours along with options of letting the user plan his or her own trip.
'Traveliving'
TravelTigerTrack tries to veer away from your standard tour planners (and so is the case with many other startups in the space like India Untraveled, Travspire, etc). They promise to make your travel experience a unique and carefree one by understanding your travel mode and destination. It offers the services starting from the time you think of going for a vacation to the time you are back home. They have a pre-holiday chat with the travelers to know what kind of getaway they want, what kind of transportation or accommodation will they prefer and then they plan everything accordingly.
Deviating a bit from the other efforts in the space, TTT focuses on the comfort of the traveler. Himanshu says, “The life we live while traveling to go to different places is often spent in the worries of managing the trip. We want to give our customers an experience of traveliving – living every moment of the travel to the fullest. We give them the option of going ‘waletless’ and careless for their vacations. Because of the extensive traveling we have done ourselves, we know where our clients can get a cutting-chai on the highway. ”
Revenues and the road ahead
TTT completely relies on revenues generated via services. In the 4 months of their existence they have catered corporate groups from Infosys, Chandigarh along with leading college groups so far. They are looking forward to setting up their Virtual Travel Desk at corporate offices like Oracle Gurgaon and Nokia Siemens Network Noida to make Traveliving an exciting experience. They are also collaborating with photographers to go with them on special photography tours.
In the last few months, we've seen a visible rise in the number of travel startups and a common trend is that all of them have gained decent traction in their catchment areas. Attaining scale will be the race (if that is the aim) and it'll be interesting to see if startups are able to explore other revenue streams and monetize online.
To know more, visit their website.
