TripHobo, a Pune based online travel planning portal announced their series A funding from Kalaari Capital. TripHobo has not disclosed the amount of funding. However, we have a confirmation that funding is between USD 1 million to 3.5 Million.
They had previously raised their seed funding from a Pune based private investor in 2012.
The funds raised by TripHobo will be utilized to invest in platform upgradation, increasing the number of itineraries and content for destinations. TripHobo currently has over 25000 user created itineraries and curated content for close to 200 top tourist cities worldwide.
TripHobo, formerly known as JoGuru, was founded in 2012 by three marketing MBAs – Praveen Kumar from IIM Lucknow, Karthik Ramachandra, from IIM Indore and Saket Newaskar from MDI, Gurgaon.
The main feature of TripHobo is personalized itinerary planner. A traveler can simply choose the destination and date they wish to travel and TripHobo presents to them with the attractions in that city.
Travelers can then choose the attractions and prepare the entire travel itinerary in minutes. If a traveler is not sure of the attractions, they can also search through thousands of itineraries created by other travelers and modify them as per their requirement.
We spoke to Saket Newaskar, CTO, TripHobo and he told us that they are now aggressively looking at developing a mobile app that will help mobile users to create travel itineraries on mobile devices.
Additionally, TripHobo also plans to develop API’s on their platform so large OTA and travel sites can seamlessly integrate TripHobo’s itineraries into their existing flow. Currently non of the large OTA’s provide this service.
We tested out TripHobo’s itinerary creation on their portal for Venice, Italy and it gave us a beautifully laid out travel plan in the end.
What’s more, travelers can also book hotels recommended by TripHobo, so they do not have to visit any other site for hotel bookings. The hotels are recommended based on the location of attractions, so it is easier for transportation. TripHobo has currently done backend integration with Booking.com for hotel recommendations and ratings.
Monetization
Travelers creating itineraries are essentially strong leads that TripHobo wants to capture and offer them to travel services providers who can value add to travelers’ needs on their trip. They take explicit consent from the travelers before sharing their details with other service providers.
Apart from this TripHobo also gets about 5 to 15 percent commission from hotel bookings that happen through their site. While they do not have any payment gateway integrated on their site as yet, they have complete access to backend of booking.com which allows they to monitor the number of bookings through them.
Apart from OTA’s, TripHobo is also currently in talks with generic tourism companies like SOTC and Thomas Cook for tie-ups.
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