When it comes to travelling, today’s generation are no less than any professional travel planner. With the entire world’s knowledge on their fingertips, people now have become independent. From planning a vacation with the family to travelling solo, people are more inclined towards experiential travel. While there are many websites and mobile application which help you to plan your travel, Holidify stands out due to its simple, quick and personalized interface.
Holidify stands for simplifying travel planning for people across the globe(the vision) by building a full-stack online platform that makes all types of travel-related information and products accessible at one place(the mission).
With this, Rohit Shroff and Kovid Kapoor, the Co-Founders of Holidify provide us with an overview of the company’s interesting journey throughout the years.
- What type of offerings does Holidify deliver? Is it limited to a B2B model?
Holidify runs www.holidify.com (the website) and Trip Planner (Android App). It has in-depth coverage on 1000+ destinations worldwide through editorial content around ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ on any destination.
Apart from that, we help travellers to connect to the trusted travel agents for the holiday packages. Also, you can find the right stay option for your vacation and exciting experiences and activities on Holidify. We have tied-up with top players in the industry, like Airbnb and Booking.com, to facilitate the same.
No, Holidify is a consumer-facing internet company. It’s an open platform and you need not pay anything to use it.
- What are the challenges your company faces? How do you overcome such challenges?
Travel, as an industry, is very competitive globally. You can see travel booking websites leaving no stone unturned to increase their market share by leveraging on deep discounts. When it comes to travel discovery and planning, it is at a juncture where both offline (travel agents, friends and families, magazines) and online ecosystems(websites, social media influencers, blogs) co-exist with no clear advantage of one over the other. In such a scenario, it is quite challenging(yet exciting) to position your product in the market.
Having said that, travel comes with its own virtue of limitless avenues of growth, be it geographically, or in terms of business transactions. There has been a recent upsurge in DIY(Do It Yourself) travel, where millennials are going a step ahead of the mainstream tourist destinations and looking for off-beat places and new vacations ideas. Holidify, as an online travel planning platform, is an ‘enabler’ that could provide authentically all the information you require for planning your next vacation as a free independent traveller.
Also, as internet penetration is growing, a platform like Holidify is successful in filling the knowledge gap around anything related to travel to a much larger audience. Today, if you want to plan your trip to Europe you can do it all by yourself and need not necessarily depend on travel agents, which was the case a few years back.
- What according to you are a few major problems faced by Travel and Tourism companies? How does Holidify help solve such issues?
Cut-throat competition, building credibility and ensuring sustainable growth are the top problems(or challenges you may say) companies in this industry are facing.
At our core, we strongly believe in ‘users first’ philosophy. We want to build a platform where the majority of the content is by actual travellers. This is how you build credibility. Growing the business metrics and achieving scales by heavily leveraging on technology, instead of increasing reliance on human resources, is instrumental to have sustainable growth.
- What is your opinion about the current scenario of the Travel and Tourism industry and your role with respect to it?
Travel and tourism contribute to more than 10% of global economic activities. One out of every five new jobs were created by this industry over the last 6 years. This gives the essence of how important the travel and tourism industry is. People are travelling more often. Almost 1.5 billion international trips happened in the past year.
Holidify stands for travel discovery and planning. We see our role, as a platform, to make all the stages of travel- inspiration, discovery, planning, booking, reviews-engaging and easy for everyone, everywhere.
- How do you motivate your team to think out-of-the-box in terms of creating innovative solutions?
We have a team of 18 people and collectively we have travelled to more than 30 countries. This brings in a lot of travel experience on the table. As a company, we encourage our team members to travel more often.
Also, there’s no better way to create a solution than to put yourself in the shoes of your customer/user. Whatever we do, we ask ourselves a question about how it is going to help someone travelling or planning to travel!
The combination of the two forces-travel experience and customer empathy-brings in fresh ideas from the team that could be transformed into practical solutions.
- How do you envision the future of your company?
Holidify is at the cusp of becoming a full-stack, global travel planning platform. Last year was amazing for us. We extended our in-depth coverage on foreign destinations, primarily the South East Asia region. While we grew to double of what we were the previous year, the traction on foreign destinations was even more exciting.
Talking about the short term plans, we are foreseeing to hit 20 million monthly users very soon. In tandem to that, we are working on new channels of revenue to fuel our growth.
By 2022, we want to be the #1 online travel planning platform globally by achieving the scale of more than 100 Mn people using and engaging on Holidify every month.
About the Leaders
Rohit Shroff, an IIT Bombay graduate and the Co-Founder of Holidify, leads the product and content strategy at Holidify. He is an avid traveller himself and wants to solve every single pain point faced by travellers around the world through innovation and technology. While Kovid Kapoor, a computer engineer from IIT Bombay, also the Co-Founder, heads the technology and product development at Holidify. His passion for building products that could provide a seamless experience to its users by leveraging cutting-edge technologies has been pivotal in Holidify’s growth to 9 Million monthly users.
Rohit and Kovid came up with Holidify in 2014. With the idea of building an online platform that would let people get travel inspiration and discover new holiday destinations, the duo bootstrapped to build the product and launched it. Since its launch, Holidify is now India’s #1 online travel planning platform with more than 9 million visitors using it every month.
