Jungle Ventures, Accel Partners backed TravelMob tightens grip over Asia Pacific

TravelMob is a social marketplace where travelling Guests can locate and book places owned by local Hosts in Asia Pacific. Working on a similar model to Airbnb, the company is making deeper inroads in the Asian market. Founded by Turochas ‘T’ Fuad and Prashant Kirtane in 2012, the company went on to raise a million dollars from Jungle Ventures and then Accel Partners also joined the round.

“We launched our site in July last year and our listings have grown 200% in just the last 6 months. We add thousands of new and unique listings every month,” says Prashant Kirtane, CTO and co-founder. Couple of months back, TravelMob partnered with Wego and in a recent announcement, has linked up with HomeAway. Travelmob has also launched a bunch of features including:

Last Minute Deals: Enable hosts (property owners) to target last minute travelers and increase booking revenues. Hosts can choose to either create Special Discounts anytime during the year or offer a Last Minute Deal.

Experience Tags: Help travellers find the type of travel experience they are looking for. Eg: “Beach”- If one is looking for a seaside accommodation or “Central” if one is looking for a place near the main shopping district. For India guests, “Group” and “Romantic" are popular tags.

The profile of the people who book on Travelmob includes group travelers, corporate retreats, honeymoons, expat relocations and even medical travel. “We started off focusing on growing the Southeast Asia region and learning from our experiences and are now working towards expanding rapidly across Asia,” says Prashant.

Most of their listings in India currently are in cities of Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, and Bangalore. “We also have got traction on vacation rental destinations like Kerala and Goa where we have hundreds of cottages, houseboats and villas on rent,” he adds.

A good knowledge of the local south east Asian market has allowed Travelmob to penetrate deeper and co-exists with Airbnb. Closer home in India, likes of RoomWale and Oravel (now pivoting) provide similar services and each is trying to differentiate on user experience and reliable listings. The market is huge, there is space for players to co-exist but only a few will survive.