International Vacations are now made easy with Pickyourtrail.

Hi, This is DevJ with Hari Ganapathy co-founder of pickyourtrail .

Startup Name: pickyourtrail

Industry: Tourism

Founders: Hari Ganapathy, Srinath Shankar.

Hi Hari Good morning, Let us start our interview?

Hi Dev Very good morning, yes sure we can.

Why pickyourtrail? Can we know the reasons to start?

I (Hari) & Srinath were motivated by our quest to provide Indian travellers to experience destinations at a leisurely pace rather than as cumbersome and restrictive packaged tours. This idea came up during our Euro trip in Aug 2012. We had to invest close to 2 months to put the entire plan together, make the bookings, ensure visa docs were in order. During the trip, we met fellow travellers who were part of package tours and were amazed at the kind of flexibility we had. Once back home folks within our network started pinging us for details on how did we go about this entire trip? These interactions slowly sowed the seeds for the overall idea.

That’s how it all began.

How your journey initiated?

We actually started off as an activity marketplace – as we believed that what you do in a place defines your vacation experience. In hindsight, we were slightly ahead of time. We had great traffic on the product, but conversions were paltry. We figured that there was no hook to book. With flights and hotels, price and availability being clear hooks. This wasn’t the case with activities.  In the process of figuring out why this was not working, the constant pain point that came through from customers was that planning an end-to-end vacation was a huge pain!

In April 2014 we pivoted. Once bitten twice shy – this time around we didn’t end up building a product end to end. Pick Your Trail was now a one-page website. We marketed it among our network, social media and email base of sign-ups we had. We had 1000 sign-ups in less than a week and our first convert on the 9th day! That was a huge morale booster. The new model meant we were also responsible for pricing and execution. Over the next 12-15 months, we spent significant time building supplier relationships, understanding the Indian outbound traveler and drawing the product roadmap basis customer interactions.

Our initial MVP website:

By End of 2015, we had an internal tool that helped us build personalized itineraries in about 30 minutes. We launched VEHO in March 2016 – VEHO was the first platform in the world where travelers could create, customize and book vacations online. The biggest differentiator was the personalization algorithm. It was the closest solution to either building an itinerary on your own or talking to a travel agent and customizing one. The catch was – all of this took hours and days while VEHO took only 2 minutes! It was an instant hit – the revenue and our efficiency scaled – we discovered new price points. Like 60,000Rs for a 5 night Bali vacation! Machines were taking over humans in true sense!

By Aug 2016, we knew that we can’t just put an MVP (VEHO) and expect more folks to come and be part of the journey. In March 2017 – we launched the current version of Pickyourtrail. We had taken VEHO one step ahead and solved multi-country itineraries. And there has been a complete design overhaul too! We have had 24-day itineraries created and booked on the platform!  We now have 230+ cities to which you can plan trips to using the platform.

What are the hurdles you faced and how you have beaten them?

The problem we set out to solve has not been easy to crack. Be it the biggies in India or world-over. Everyone still sells packages. Indian travelers continue to be exposed to packaged, run-of-the-mill travel experiences. Aren’t you tired of Waiting for agent quotes, or putting your vacation plan together in an excel? We want to make vacation planning fun. Help you discover the best possible price, suggest that unique activity that suits your taste and provide real-time support that elevates you are an in-trip experience. read the full interview at startupsindia.in