Shiju and his team are very much optimistic about the company’s future
Mr Shiju Radhakrishnan
Chennai: Mr Shiju Radhakrishnan is bitten by wanderlust. The 34-year-old IT professional in Bangalore loves to travel to new destinations whenever he gets a few days off from work. However, he often gets frustrated, as he just can’t find a travel service portal that offers a comprehensive approach. He wants to log on to a website that aggregates the entire process of travelling — from researching, planning, booking a holiday package and to reaching the destination.
This is exactly where Shiju saw a business opportunity just about three years ago. Having quit his cushy job with an MNC, he joined five friends to start iTraveller.com in 2012. iTraveller is a tech-enabled platform that aggregates tour operators and hotels.
Here, a user can plan, discover services and completely customise holiday packages according to his needs and tastes to about 650 destinations worldwide. “The platform offers online discovery services with relevant information gleaned from native and trusted suppliers and allows a user to book holidays according to his choice. The platform also offers the most competitive prices on packages that have been fully designed for travellers online,” Shiju said.
Operators upload all the information about hotels, activities and transfer rates in the back end of the platform which is then accessed by customers at the front end enabling them to book their trips based on real time data. “We also help travellers create itineraries for their trip and allow them to book their own created packages online without any manual intervention.
Also, there are no intermediaries. This way, they can eliminate unwanted stuff and get huge price benefits,” explained Shiju. “Sellers, on the other hand, can feed real time data and can meet the requirements of the package created by the users,” he added. This Bangalore-based company has got good support from venture capitals and angel investors.
Started with an initial investment of Rs 12 lakh, the company then received an angel funding of about Rs 1.5 crore from Private angels and Let’sVenture in different stages. In December last year, the company received Series A funding of $1 million from Mantra Ventures and Let’sVenture.
Explaining the revenue model of the company, Shiju stated, “When a customer books a package through iTraveller.com, we take a certain percentage of the total package size as commission and pass on the rest to the suppliers.” Till date, the company has done business of about $4.2 million. “Our current monthly gross sales value is about $250,000,” he said.
Shiju and his team are very much optimistic about the company’s future. “The online travel sector in India alone is going to be a $120-billion industry by end of this decade. iTraveller has set itself an ambitious target to reach $1 billion in gross sales value by end of 2019. We are set well on the path to achieve it with a 20 per cent month-on-month increase in gross sales value in last six months,” he said.
The site is now getting about 1.5 lakh hits per month. The company is also aiming to increase the number of destinations listed on its platform to 1,000 from the current 650 locations by including hotspots in Europe and USA shortly. Next month, the team is coming up with iTraveller’s mobile app. On the funding side, the founders are planning raise $10 million in Series B funding in the upcoming months from both new and existing investors.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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