Are you a carefree backpacker, with wanderlust coursing through your veins? Have the tantalising mountains, the peaceful rivers, the mystifying meadows and the sunny sands called out to you? Has your venturing spirit spoken to you of an approaching voyage to lands unknown? If yes, then you are in the right place reading the right article.
India’s 10 Best Travel Tech Companies To Watch, 2020 is an edition that aims to exhibit innovative organizations and their game-changing platforms, solutions and services which are driving the travel and tourism industry to new heights. Among these companies, one emerging player set to take the travel and tourism industry by storm, is QuaQua, a content-first travel platform. It is has a few renowned patents to its name. It also uses AI for seamless user experience.
QuaQua is the world’s first end-to-end travel platform that incorporates the entire life-cycle of a traveller at a single place – from inspiration, to planning, booking, on the ground support and post-travel memories. The company’s objective is to deliver real and immersive travel experiences through storytelling, that inspire people to travel.
QuaQua aims to bridge the gap between METADATA (curated and non-redundant information related to each POI), CONTENT (immersive visual stories augmented with QuaQua features), BOOKINGS (Personalized and curated visual itineraries and facilitation) and COMMUNITY (Travelers and content creators) by providing a platform for both businesses and travelers alike.
QuaQua, through an intelligent, intuitive and interactive UX, strives to engage users to personalize experiences and consume persona driven virtual travel journeys. The company’s vision is to be a leader in providing real and mesmeric travel experiences. Its mission is to create a world class platform, provide end-to-end experiences, partner with travel/tourism ecosystem, and leverage intelligent technologies.
In accordance with this mission, QuaQua has garnered a number of awards and recognition since its inception. Just after the launch of its platform in Augusts 2018, the company has created content for 140 cities, with 2000+ experiences, 1000+ itineraries, 2700+ points of interests, 31000+ tickets and tours and 11500+ events. In the last 4 months QuaQua has over 2.5+ million views across all channels with an average user increasing at a rate of 265% every month.
QuaQua was awarded as one of India’s top 10 AR/VR Startups by Silicon India. It has also won two of the award category in The Millennial Max Conference organized in association with the LNOD Roundtable, namely, ‘Best Company for Millennials to work’ and ‘Best Startup of the Year’.
Driving towards Glory
At the helm of QuaQua’s young prominence and strive for business excellence are Purav Shah, the Co-founder and CEO, and Sandesh Reddy, the Co-founder, and Head of Finance & Strategy.
Purav is a consultant by karma and an entrepreneur by nature. His passion for work and life has guided him through his 18+ years of professional career. His love for 3Ts – Travel, TV and Technology led him to set up QuaQua.com, his long-time dream. He is a keen proponent of the Army cause and vigorously vocal in favour of women empowerment in various forums.
At QuaQua, Purav is responsible for vision alignment and growth strategy in his day to day role. He has been acutely involved in ideation to product feature, building to gaining traction and brining the platform to a “scale-up” stage in his first year at QuaQua. In the recent past and foreseeable future, he will be responsible to take the platform global, strengthening associate partnerships and most critical of all – digital marketing and promotion efforts.
Purav has also been one of the speakers on Metasearch & OTAs for Digital Travel Summit APAC 2019; One Globe Forum, 2019; IAMAI 2019, Millennial Max Conference organized by LNOD Roundtable, 2019.
Meanwhile, a travel enthusiast who has voyaged across 30+ countries, Sandesh has varied interests ranging from the field of disruptive technologies, health tech, real estate, AR/VR and strategy (finance). He graduated on the dean’s list in Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration from Georgia Institute of Technology. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Global Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management.
At QuaQua, Sandesh is responsible for Investor Management, Finance Management and Experiences Business. His initial contribution has been towards setting up critical business, compliance, governance and finance processes. He is also responsible for establishing and managing corporate partnerships at QuaQua. Currently, his major focus is on content distribution and setting up virtual reality arcades and 360o experiential theaters at major travel catchment zones.
Sandesh has also represented QuaQua at the A-Scale Programme by Anthill, Singapore 2019 and at the World Digital Travel and Hospitality Summit, Beijing.
Innovation Redefined
QuaQua will enable travelers to dream, plan, book, experience, travel and socialize memories. Therefore, QuaQua has introduced world class products to each phase of travel. The company’s product offerings are as follows
A. Inspiration:
- QuaQua originals: Creating curated content in form of stories for every Point of Interest in the world along with standardized meta information for the same.
- QuaQua TV: Linear Streaming/VOD channel with focus on travel and lifestyle
Domes & Pods: World’s first immersive infotainment and enhanced engagement by creating VR zones.
B. Planning:
- City Pages: Applying metadata, content, booking and community for each city in the world.
- Associate network: Creating a network of vloggers, videographers and bloggers.
- Customizable Itineraries: Creating customizable itineraries for each city for a period of between 1-7 days.
C. Booking:
- Metasearch: Introducing first ever metasearch engine for Flights, Attractions and Activities.
- Hyper Integration: $ 8.31 Tn travel ecosystem in one place – One stop shop for all travel needs.
D. Profile:
- Personalization: Provide intelligent feedback and suggestions at content, information, itinerary and transaction level.
Next in line for them is packages. They plan to introduce metasearch for hotels, packages and be the first website to have comparison model of holiday packages.
QuaQua is inherently a B2B2C model. While the company integrates the best of content, information, ratings, bookings and the likes for our consumers, we act as an integrator for the travel ecosystem. Its B2B network includes flight, events, attraction and activities.
QuaQua has already created the world’s first metasearch engine for attractions, activities and experiences. “We are proud to have industry leaders such as Skyscanner, Ticketmaster, GetYourGuide, Musement, and Viator (TripAdvisor company) as our partners,” the co-founders express.
Addressing the Industry’s Shortcomings
Sharing their understanding of the current problems in the travel and tourism industry, team QuaQua states that, 43% travellers admit that they pay higher prices of flight/hotels due to delay in decision making and they face a fragmented experience due to disjoint platforms for different travel offerings.
The team believes that it takes 45 days in planning a vacation and it takes 38 touch points on different websites during a booking journey, this is global industry average.
According to the team, other problems which create barriers between travellers and a quality experience are, being misguided through social media; unauthenticated reviews; obsolete and redundant data; monotonous planning process; non-personalized information; lack of AI engine leading to wrong recommendations of information; non-curated information; inadequate or exaggerated travel marketing; absence of better security infrastructure for travellers; and absence of reliable information systems.
QuaQua offers a plethora of solutions to tackle these limitations and barriers. It enables travelers to see the destination before planning their travel, the VR and AR technologies enables the travelers to decide whether a particular destination matches their preferences or not. Through its city highlights section curated by the locals, the uniqueness of the destinations is correctly communicated.
While the betterment of the infrastructure is addressed by the governments, QuaQua tries to cater to end to end requirements of the travellers leaving them with no ambiguity right from what they can expect from a destination, places to stay and eat with the precautions to be taken while on travel to any destination.
QuaQua relies on various online information systems, information from its associates and locals, extensive data analytics to provide the most accurate and real time information about a destination on its platform.
Beholding a Transformative Future
QuaQua is a content first platform aiming to deliver real and captivating travel experiences through storytelling, that inspire people to travel. The company intends to focus on a smooth traveler journey that rightfully starts from the planning phase and ends with the community sharing phase.
The company meticulously creates, curates and integrates engaging travel experiences that would inspire people to travel, virtually first and physically later. And what more, unlike any other travel platform out there, it leverages Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality to bring immersive, interactive, informative 360o stories on mobile, web, VR glasses and even 360o domes.
“Our AI based personalization engine coupled with patented dynamic story telling will help us scale faster than any other success story one has encountered in this industry,” state the co-founders. In the next 1 year, QuaQua shall be amongst the top 3 content-based travel platform and top 3 360-degree travel content consumption platform. The users are also benefited by the 2D and 360-degree travel content as it is free for consumption. The company’s metasearch engine for experiences and activities is the only one out there and with the first mover advantage, it intends to be the top player in this space.
To learn more about QuaQua, its platform and offerings, visit: www.quaqua.com
