Page 25 - The 10 Most Innovative Startups in Travel 2019

“ from different walks of life and
We Are
Consciously
Trying Not To Be
Pulled Into The
Price War Of
Selling Cheap
Packages
To Lure The
Price Sensitive
Segment Of The
Audience
have priceless experiences. This is
our actual wealth and it cannot be
perceived from our balance sheets!
Future Plans
Our focus will be on continuing to
give great delivery on our trips and
keeping our quality world class.
We will also continue our
experiments with a lot of theme
based trips.
We would love to open up a lot
more regions than we are already
doing now. Kailash and some
foreign trips are on the cards.
We would also try our best to
spread awareness in multiple ways
about not undermining our biggest
natural assets - mountains, and
commoditizing them for short term
gains.
We would love to become a
platform for a lot of young people
who wish to make a career in
adventure/experiential travel
industry, and we hope to have so
much continuous work to sustain
such efforts.
Experiential Travel Today
Experiential Travel is on the
rise in India and a lot of people
│SwiftNLift│August 2019│
Another main challenge was to get
economic strata are embracing
this way of travelling. I think it is
a much better way to travel than
the sedentary kind of traveling
of yesteryears which was mainly
hotel/taxi/viewpoint without any
active personal engagement. It
also means a slow shift towards an
active lifestyle and sporty culture
which was largely nonexistent with They were mostly guests whom
urban Indians. I think this is a big
positive. This trend will pave the
way for a new industry and open
up career choices for the young
who wish to make something more
out of their love for sport, travel
and adventure.
There is too much competition
in this sector and a lot of non-
outdoorsy businesses are getting
onto the experiential travel
bandwagon to make a quick buck
and commercializing what was
purely a passion driven industry.
I think this is a phase the industry
has to go through before the
end customers themselves start
recognizing the good and weeding
out the bad ones.
The Journey & the In-between
When I started, it was just me
with a vision and a desire to build
a lifestyle that would quench my
own personal thirst for exploration
and adventures. I intended to build
a company where I could bring my
knowledge of the mountains and
leading groups to good use.
My initial challenge was mostly in
getting good people on board who
believed in my vision. Good people
always came with a high price
tag. So, I had to rely on part time
interns, high school graduates and
anybody with any skill who could
pitch in for free or cheap. Slowly
things turned. For the first seven
months, with help from part-time
interns and freelancers we came
up with our initial offerings and
website. We ran our first trip in Jan,
2017 in the peak winter of Ladakh.
With our content person joining in
April, 2017, our social media came
to life and we were successful in
making some flutter in the market.
our first few believers to sign up for
a trip. Prospective guests always
wanted to see past record of a
company and were wary of trusting
a single founder, esp somebody
selling adventure travel where there
is an inherent risk factor involved.
Despite multiple challenges, my
first believers did come through.
I had led in the past and my own
friends. A decent amount of
referrals also worked for us. Our
total focus on delivering good trips
helped us build some name and
a good body of work in different
regions of the Himalaya. In the first
2 years we did take a lot of hits in
running trips. We ran trips even at
a loss for small groups, even for 3
guests, a couple and even 1 guest!
But, that was a business decision
and a conscious choice to roll
whatever the no.s. It was not the
wisest choice. I burnt more money
than I saved. It ate into my cash
reserve but gave us visibility and
some momentum.
In the second year, we could
experiment a little and opened a
few new trips and areas. I led most
of my trips to ensure high quality
of delivery. The business took a
hit whenever I was away since
everything else seemed to stop. I
convinced myself saying that these
present paying customers would
bring back more clients. This did
help since it gave us a lot of word
of mouth and some referrals of
new guests from the ones who had
already tripped with us. Till date
we have run over 30 trips with avg
duration of 9 days and have had
some great reviews.
In the third year, we wish to build
on the momentum we have been
able to generate and continue doing
great work.
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