Tech Startup: Tripnary

This month in our travel-tech startup series we meet Abhishek Ghuwalewala, Founder & CEO of Tripnary, an early-stage seed-funded travel startup. We catch up with Abhishek to  learn more about this new idea that is helping travelers tick of their destination bucket list.

1. Tell us, who is your start-up for?

Tripnary is targeted towards price-conscious leisure travelers who are looking for ideas and inspiration before thinking about booking a ticket.

2. Why did you create this start-up – was there a gap in the travel industry that inspired you? 

As a traveler, I enjoy reading about interesting places in magazines, Flipboard, blogs and seeing pictures of other people’s vacations on Facebook. In fact, for many, the web has become the biggest way travelers are creating their itineraries. I had accumulated many travel ideas over several years – places I wanted to visit, restaurants where I wanted to eat, or unique hotels to stay at but my ideas became scattered across spreadsheets, emails, Pinterest, Evernote (and yes Notepad).

About 1.7 billion leisure trips are researched and planned online – Tripnary

I conceptualized Tripnary because I did not see anything at the intersection of online bookmarking and travel search. Tripnary today fills the gap between bookmarking and booking.

3. Okay, we’re intrigued. So how does it work?

Tripnary takes your bucket list a step further by making your travel ideas actionable with personalized flight search. With your travel bucket list in hand, you can easily compare prices to discover a vacation destination that fits your budget. Now you can basically search for travel without a specific destination in mind.

Think of it as Pinterest meets Kayak. Tripnary lets you decide your next vacation destination based on your budget.

68% of travelers research online before deciding where to travel – Tnooz

4. Travel Massive is about empowering change in travel. How is your start-up changing the future of the industry or helping to make travel better?

Travelers today are limited to using bookmarks, spreadsheets, notepads, Pinterest, Evernote etc., to save travel ideas. While some of these are good apps for collecting information, ultimately, all they offer is a rudimentary list of links or pictures. Tripnary is changing the way travelers make decisions amongst all the places they care about based on budget – often the single biggest component of a vacation. We are giving travelers the tool to check off places in their bucket list, one destination at a time.

5. What challenges have you faced in getting your start-up off the ground and gaining traction in the industry?

Not surprisingly, the key challenge with any B2C product is acquiring and retaining users. We are experimenting with a number of different strategies to find one that will organically take the product mainstream and amplify its virality. We are working hard to find our early adopters in niche communities and targeting them to expand the base of our core users. We haven’t done any paid advertising yet since for startups it can prove to be very costly.

6. Is the app free? 

The app is available absolutely free in the Apple App Store.

7. Having more than a decade of experience in the industry, where do you see the online travel industry in 5 years?

The industry is moving towards personalized travel experiences. Recently Amadeus survey showed that a majority of travelers believe that there is still scope for improvement in travel search and shopping and greater personalization ranked second in travelers’ wish list for improvement. We think this data overwhelmingly points to a need for travel apps to deliver specific experiences to individual users. We think there is going to be a strong move towards automation and personalization.

At Tripnary we can use data to recommend additional sights, activities, restaurants that will appeal to that specific user based on their profile. Tripnary is also personalizing the user’s flight search by showing airfares for only the destinations on the user’s bucket list, free of clutter from places that they don’t care about.

8. What do you think is the biggest challenge in the travel industry you would like to see resolved or improved?

The biggest challenge for the industry is that startups with innovative ideas are having difficulty succeeding because travel data (live fares, inventory, historical data) is very hard to access. Getting GDS data is almost impossible for a bootstrapped startup because of the high upfront and ongoing costs associated with integrating with those systems. This puts any startup in the travel industry at an inherent disadvantage. It’s no surprise that many new travel apps resort to “alternative” ways to access information. If there is one thing I would like to see improved, it would be a more open approach to these databases so startups are on an equal level playing field and can focus more on innovating in new areas.

9. Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful start-up?

Ship fast and get your product out of the door in front of your users as soon as possible. Getting customer feedback is invaluable.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Fail fast and fail often – Abhishek Ghuwalewala, CEO Tripnary

10. You must travel a lot yourself. Tell us about your favourite travel style?

Sometimes we get caught in the trap of trying to see everything and check off all the places in a destination. When I travel, I like to spend more time in one place and absorb the experience rather than rush to the next destination. I also love to travel to off-beat destinations and observe the culture and community of a place.

11. What is the most important thing during your travels?

I am a big foodie. One of the things that’s important to me when I travel is to dive into the local dining scene. I am always on the lookout for eclectic restaurants, food trucks, and other off-beat eateries. Being vegetarian sometimes limits my options as to what I can try, but the thrill of finding some amazing joint far away from home is very exciting.

12. If you could book a ticket tomorrow, where would you go?

Atacama Desert in Chile to photograph the night stars.

Tech Startup is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel-tech start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Follow Tripnary on Travel Massive.