Imagine leaving your office early and taking your bagpack to find yourself standing on the banks of Ramganga, as the bamboo raft is being readied to ferry you across to Vanghat( Uttarakhand) with all the beauty of wilderness around. That’s what Wandertrails does for you.
Launched last year, Wandertrails is bringing a fresh approach to explore places which focuses on experience and exploring elusive beauties of places rather than just ticking it off the bucket list.
Not just travelling, the startup is also breaking stereotypes with its founders team. Not just one or two, the 8 month old startup is the brainchild of five founders including Hari Gangadharan Nair(CTO), Pranav Kumar Suresh( Strategy and sales), Sruti Ramesh Chander( COO), Vishnu Menon K(CEO), Narayana Menon K(CMO) who are ardent travellers cum friends. And the key to join their 60-member team is to be a traveller.
Being avid travellers themselves, the founders understand the nitty-gritty’s of travel hassles and the expectations which helps them to set the experience right. Bengaluru-based Wandertrails, an experiential travel startup, currently, hosts more than 5,000 experiential stays and activities in 65 destinations across 12 states.
Business
To ensure that all the listed places are standardized and render quality experience, the team visits the place and verifies the details before onboarding them. The ticket size ranges from Rs 1000-40,000 per night.
The listed stays include homestays, shacks, tree houses, resorts and much more.
The company claims to have clocked 3000 units of sale alongwith 30,000 monthly active users. The startup also says that 50% of the business has been driven by referrals and repeats. In the next six months, Wandertrails plans to list 100 destinations across 20 states.
The startup raised $1 million seed funding earlier this year. With the fresh funds, the company plans to expand in Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Pune and drive user engagement with quality content.
“The focus for entrepreneurs should most definitely be on value creation and not valuation. If the former happens, the latter will follow suit. In such a setting, it is also crucial for the overall ecosystem to move away from a pure discounting play to a more service led & delivery excellence led business model," says Vishnu.
Travel segment
Recently the travel segment has been witnessing alot of buzz. While travel booking portals Ibibo group and MakeMyTrip completed their merger last month, Oyo Rooms is in talks to raise about $300-500 million. Moreover, online homestay and alternate stay aggregator Stayzilla has suspended its operations and is set to reboot with a different business model.
Amid all this consolidation and shutdowns, it will be interesting to see if the market is ready to adapt ‘experiential travel’ and if that becomes the new norm, and ofcourse how this new entrant draws its graph in the next few years.
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