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Leader of the Pack: Digant and Priyanka of New Delhi

We want our global Travel Massive community to get to know each other better so we decided to interview co-organizers and feature them on the blog. On the last post, we talked to Irene Pallais of New Orleans Travel Massive. This time, the spotlight is on Digant and Priyanka Sharma of Delhi Travel Massive.

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Digant Sharma, CEO and Founder of SoDelhi.com was born and brought up in Delhi, had studied & worked in the UK and recently moved back to Delhi after a period of 10 years. Due to his passion for everything web related and love for travelling all across the world and for the lack of any decent portal covering his hometown in depth, he decided to create a city brand for his beloved city which materialized into“SoDelhi”. Priyanka Sharma, Co-Founder was born in the UK but having grown up in India, also studied/worked in the UK for a period of 5 years. She has always been an avid traveller and hence followed suit in realizing her dreams of working in the Travel Industry.

SoDelhi.com is an online portal which covers the different facets of the capital city of India – what to do, what to see, where to stay, where to eat and much more. It showcases not only the top businesses within the city but also encourages “the local experience” in order to give the traveller a real taste of the city, its sights, its people & its culture. This platform allows the traveller to conveniently browse through various directories related to Delhi such as About, Stay, Dine, See & Do, Events, Tours, Travel & Local. People can also browse through and book different category of hotels, various Delhi and outside Delhi tours and also make table reservations at various restaurants in the city.

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Tell us a little about the travel industry in India.

According to the WTO, by the year 2020, it is expected that India will become the leader in the tourism industry in South Asia, with about 8.9 million arrivals. It also states that India’s travel and tourism industry will directly contribute INR 3,345 billion (USD 61 billion) to the GDP and will also be responsible for creating about 40 million jobs by 2019. The online travel industry in India however is still at a nascent stage with more emphasis being put on the E-Commerce aspect of Hotel, Airline & Train bookings. More efforts need to go in developing platforms that concentrate on the experience after the consumer reaches their destination.

What travel company do you admire the most and why?

Lonely Planet – For being able to set trends with the help of their guide books and being the market leaders for the same. Their story on how they started, why they wrote their first book and made a multi-million dollar business purely out of their love for travel, is magical.

What are some of your favourite travel websites?

NYCGo– for travellers going into New York is the best when it comes to city specific travel & lifestyle portals. Wanderfly is another great website that we look upto for travel research. A newcomer that we really admire is EscapeFlight, especially for its super-cool interface.As far as the old timers are concerned, TripAdvisor is certainly the best out there with its vast database of user generated content.

Delhi Ajay Bhaskar

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in Delhi and in your industry?

Travel 3.0 Pre Travel Research. Gone are those days when people travel and after reaching their destination, look for a bookstore to find an off the shelf guidebook. People want to know what they will be doing way in advance and in most cases are looking for more customized itineraries. In India, this is slowly becoming a trend as well with most of the pre-travel research being done on the web & mobile than any other medium. The Local Experience Travellers coming into Delhi now want to experience the city like locals – the regular sightseeing etc. is slowly being overtaken by experiences such as homestays, living with the locals, cooking like the locals etc.

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Why did you decide to organize Travel Massive meetups in your city?

Mariellen Ward from Toronto approached us with the idea of organizing the first ever Travel Massive meetup in Delhi. We were delighted with the idea and immediately decided to go ahead with it since there was no other platform in Delhi, which gave travel enthusiasts a chance to meet up and tell everyone their own stories & experiences. We decided to organize Delhi Travel Massive purely for the love of travel and to give an opportunity to fellow travellers in Delhi to be able to meet &interact with each other on a larger scale.

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Who have you met at Travel Massive Delhi recently?

We met with companies such as Make My Trip, IXIGO, Condé Nast and various Tour Operators, Travel Bloggers, Travel Photographers & Travel Writers in the City.

Who inspires you to travel?

Some inspiring people that come to mind are: Christopher Johnson McCandless & Tony & Maureen Wheeler.

NYC

If you can book a ticket for tomorrow, where will you go?

Nagaland in East India, Ladakh in Jammu & Kashmir.

 

Leader of the pack is a monthly series that profiles organizers of Travel Massive meet-ups around the world!


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