Travel Advice From Your Local Cousin

Aarti Kanodia and Kunal Jain, co-founders (and actual cousins) of Your Local Cousin help connect travellers with locals across 80 countries and 200+ cities with customized travel ideas.

Aarti, part of Travel Massive New York City and Kunal, part of Travel Massive Delhi have come together to share with us some of their best stories from their startup.

Who is your startup for?

Your Local Cousin is a peer-to-peer service platform where travelers can ask for advice from locals via a conversation (Skype), e-mail or text and receive customized maps and itineraries.  We have over 450 ‘Local Cousins’ from over 80 countries and 200+ cities and vetted them to ensure a high-quality customer experience. Locals get paid 70% of revenue. Travelers give detailed information about their budget, their travel companions, their interests and how they want to communicate.  Hence, the advice is truly tailored to the traveler.

What inspired you to create this startup?

We come from a large extended family scattered throughout the world.  While planning trips we speak with family who answer questions like “how do I pack for a wedding in Singapore?”, “what is the hottest new restaurant in Mumbai?” and “how do I get around Houston?”. Our families know our travel-style and this type of customized advice is hard to find from strangers or review sites.  It just made sense to build a network of ‘Local Cousins’ who can give more personalized travel advice the way a friend would.

What makes your startup different from other similar startups?

Not many services allow travelers the simple act of connecting to a human being who lives in the city they are visiting – as they would a friend and priced comparatively to substitutes. We also try to save travelers time and money. Locals provide insider tips within 48 hours on average and speak from the heart about what they love, how to avoid the tourist traps and even provide money saving tips.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

At the end of January, 2015 we built a minimum viable product (MVP) over a few days – a simple site that allowed travelers to fill out a form and get connected to a local for just $10. On the first day we “launched” we had paying customers. Since then we have added different methods of communication and introduced a free trial. We have spent little on marketing and have mainly used our social networks, alumni networks and attended events like Travel Massive to help grow our business and even gain some press!

What is the most important thing during your travels?

The best experiences during our travels are when our actual cousins take us around their hometowns. There is nothing like having an “insider’s guide” into a city with people who know it best. For example, visiting Kolkata’s (Calcutta’s) largest wholesale flower market at 6 am, eating Tex-Mex late at night in Houston and bargaining for jewelry through the winding streets of the yellow fort-city of Jaisalmer, India.

As a startup, what benefits have you seen from being a part of Travel Massive meet-ups?

A few months back we met Sean Flynn from Travel and Leisure and he wrote a great article about us. We have also met many other great people from the travel industry who are now friends!

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Your Local Cousins’ on Travel Massive, Facebook or Twitter.