TripThirsty's bet on Social Integration to capitalize on the last minute travel market

Have you heard of the fire triangle? It is said that three elements are required for a fire to happen - Fuel, Oxygen and Heat. A fire cannot exist even if one of these elements are missing. This concept is used in building a campfire and for firefighting. Tripthirsty co-founder, Kingsley Joseph draws an analogy from this for the travel industry. He says, "For travel to materialize, three elements are required - Time, Money and Company. Of course there are those who travel alone, but if you see a group, there are various people who satisfy these three conditions. While time is something that we don't have any control over, TripThirsty helps with the company and money part."

Tripthirsty offers attractive deals for accommodation during off season. Kingsley shared, "Hotels in these tourist destinations lose a lot of money during the off season times and don't mind offering discounts for accommodation during this time. We present these deals to people who want to travel to those places and the Hotels love that." TripThirsty earns a travel agent commission for every hotel booking made from their platform - "There's a 18 - 20% margin that we make using these transactions and we've made about 6 Lakhs from this alone since the time we started (which is close to 6 months)."

However, Kingsley believes that TripThirsty's emphasis on social features is its key differentiator from others in the last minute deals space. He says, "A TripThirsty user logs in via Facebook and makes a wishlist of places he or she would like to visit. We now send out weekly emails to our users which will notify them of their Facebook friends who also want to go to the same place. This in a way solves the company problem of the travel triangle and a lot of our users who have told us that they really like it."

There's another social feature that TripThirsty has recently launched which is an extension to the previous feature. Once you know the people from your friends list who want to join you for a trip, you can create a Facebook event directly from TripThirsty. The TripThirsty blog on this feature says, "When a Facebook connected user expresses interest in one of our deals, they can invite their other TripThirsty friends to their fresh trip plan in just a click."

At the end of our coversation Kingsley further shared that they will also be adding some gamification elements to TripThirsty in the coming months. That, however, was a conversation for another day. He also shared that the company is looking to raise an institutional round of funding in the coming months.

TripThirsty is a startup buzzing with activity and we'll keep you posted with more updates. But until then, have you made your travel wishlist yet?