In our professional life, whether we prefer it or not, we have to travel for our work purposes. So, why not invest in something which makes our life and our company’s work easy?
With the aim to reduce organizations’ business travel expenditure, ITILITE, an integrated AI-powered SaaS-based travel platform provides an unbeatable solution. Through a unique model of employee incentivization, its goal is to make the corporate booking experiences seamless.
In this interview, founders, Mayank Kukreja and Anish Khadiya, have made an effort to showcase the endless amount of work and dedication put in by the team at ITILITE to bring a change in the way business travels work.
What type of offerings does ITILITE deliver? Is it limited to a B2B model?
ITILITE was formed with the aim to bring business travel online and to streamline the entire business travel ecosystem through an offering that balances technology innovation & human intervention.
ITILITE has a 3-pronged business model aimed at the finance team, the admin teams, and the end customers.
With data & rewards at its centre, ITILITE drives value across audiences.
Companies use ITILITE’s platform to encourage the cost-consciousness of employees during business travel, while on the other hand employees get to keep a part of the savings as personal rewards by saving money for the company. This drives conscientious choices, while ensuring compliance and budgeting.
Through its intelligent platform that functions on consumer-focused touch points ITILITE learns employee preferences and creates personalized recommendations which not only enable faster process, but also allow financially viable options to be curated for the benefit of the customer.
Thus, through a mutually beneficial, technologically driven and cost-effective approach, ITILITE strives to make the business travel experience a coherent and enjoyable one for companies and employees alike.
What are the challenges your company faces? How do you overcome such challenges?
One of the biggest challenges that we face is the balancing act between organizations and end-users. Travel, even business travel, is a service-based industry. ITILITE aims to create a great business travel experience; from booking to the actual travel, and post-travel processes.
In this context, our biggest demand is to live up to customer expectations in terms of our clients, as well as the end-user. This implies that we need to deliver excellence for B2B as well as B2C. The ITILITE offering is not a one-time exercise. With every trip, every booking, and every process, the need for excellence is paramount. Hence, the challenge is to deliver the best experience with every experience that the client has.
To deliver on all fronts, we ensure a dynamic development strategy which is customer-sourced. Our customer success teams are in touch with the client, to ensure all feedback is received, and acted upon wherever possible, to make the platform deliver on user expectations, thereby making adoption easier and more beneficial to the organization. Our rewards model also drives adoption and positive experiences by ensuring that the user gains as well as the organization when adhering to company policy or picking a budget-friendly travel option.
Our policy of being customer-first has let us not only deliver great experiences, but also sets us apart as a player that impacts the business ecosystem, and not only as one that delivers a travel package.
What is your opinion about the current scenario of the Travel and Tourism industry and your role with respect to it?
The current travel & tourism industry is just that: travel & tourism.
In this setup, business travel forms one added offering wherein the customer-facing services are catering to business travel requirements. It has been seen in multiple industries, a consumer service cannot efficiently cater to a business requirement. While the B2C sector is doing well, despite multiple problems of funds, carriers shutting down, and more, the business travel sector is sadly underserved.
This is due to a few reasons:
- The tedious and offline business travel booking process
- Massively fragmented market
- Focus on ‘cheapest tickets’ over long-term value
- Lack of strong technology innovation in the space
ITILITE is built for corporate, and by business travelers. Therefore, it addresses various issues unresolved by the incumbent travel management models. We are building the first smart, cost-efficient and employee-friendly platform in a market which is currently dominated globally by offline processes and clunky systems. Specifically, we fill 3 gaps in the market:
- Cost Reduction
- Employee Productivity
- Company Control & Insights
Through this approach, we break the clutter of the travel industry which focuses purely on lowest cost per ticket and deliver long-lasting organization-level value. By rewarding employees to choose smarter options, we ensure behavioral change aligned to policy compliance, while maintaining happiness quotient.
By delivering periodic insights to organizations, we drive growth on a real-time basis. Through a digitally hosted platform, we provide support to the overall budgeting processes by creating a seamless, trackable experience at all levels.
How do you envision the future of your company?
In the coming year, we aim to grow our clientele to 500 businesses. We will also be establishing an international presence to support our multi-country customers and then to serve the increasing demand we are seeing from those countries. With support from our customers, we see it as a natural progression in our growth journey. As we grow our market share, we will also forge partnerships with other technology startups and companies that will allow us to offer a seamless experience to our customers.
About the Leaders
Mayank Kukreja is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at ITILITE, and an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad. Prior to co-founding ITILITE, Mayank worked with McKinsey and Myntra where his role revolved across strategy, operations, sales, product development and pricing.
On the other hand, Anish Khadiya, also the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at ITILITE, and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Lucknow. Anish has spent more than 14 years gaining professional experience across sectors including time spent at McKinsey & Myntra.
Travelling has been a key aspect of their professional lives, and ITILITE is the result of personal experience with corporate travel, and the state thereof. At one point, Mayank and Anish were travelling for almost 200 days in a year for their respective projects. They realized, planning a business trip was an offline, time-consuming process every single time.
That is when an idea started evolving: A new approach to business travel that helps companies save on travel costs while creating a convenient and rewarding experience for employees.
