Planning for a trip and need suggestions? Ask your friends about the places. They will suggest you the places where they had been and will help you. But what about the places that are less known?
India is a country where there are thousands of places to visit. And it is hard to know about all places. To make your holiday destination discovery easier, two IIT-ians have launched a new travel discover startup called Holidify. Holidify is a venture started by IIT-ians Rohit Shroff and Kovid Kapoor. It helps people discover beautiful but less known places of India for vacation.
Holidify was launched earlier this year on January 7. It has listed more than 300 travel destinations to visit in India.
What is Holidify.com?
Holidify.com is a destination discovery website that helps travelers find the right destinations according to their preferences and help them plan their holidays in a hassle free manner. With interactive map interface and powerful filters, travelers can plan their vacations like never before.
Idea behind Holidify
“I as a traveler have struggled to find new and offbeat destinations on the web. Having traveled to the most obvious destinations, I needed a way to find the unexplored destinations without searching it on random blogs and travel discussion forums. There is a lot of information present on the internet, but it is so unstructured that one can’t find use them in a user-friendly way. Plus it is highly time consuming. This is why we started Holidify,” Founder Rohit said.
When you first visit the website, it offers three options: Explore, Weekend and Surprise Me.
Explore option lets you select travel destinations of India from the Map. It lists state-wise map of India with destinations count of that state. Clicking the state map will explore the map and show you the places of that state. Clicking on a travel destination, it displays short description of the place, what to do, where to stay, what to eat, how to reach and reviews.
Weekend option is for finding a weekend trip around your place. Suppose if you are in Mumbai, you can find places to visit around Mumbai for this weekend. I personally like this section to find my next weekend trip.
‘Surprise Me’ option redirects users to a random destination to visit.
Team:
Kovid Kapoor and Rohit Shroff are the founding members who are graduates from IIT Bombay. Kovid comes from a Computer Science background and he leads the technical side for Holidify. Rohit Shroff is leading the product development, marketing and business development. Manu Sharma, a graduate from CBS, Delhi has recently joined the team and she is heading content for us.
Apart from the team members, company also have a group of 4-5 interns from IIT-Delhi, IIT-Bombay and DU who help holidify in getting things done quickly.
Funding:
Holidify is self-funded right now. Founders are running the startup on their own savings. “We took some money from our family and friends and that is keeping us going at this stage,” they said. They plan to stay bootstrapped for some more time and focus just on the product and get the rest of lesser known destinations on the tourist map of India.
The journey so far
“Kovid was a good friend from IIT Bombay and he being from a computer science background and his interest in travelling made him the perfect co-founder for the startup. We brainstormed on this idea and built a prototype in less than a month.
After showing the prototype to a lot of friends and colleagues, we decided to take it seriously and got a small team of content developers and we started building the website. With multiple iterations and feedback, we finally released our product in January 2014 and the feedback has been super-encouraging. We are receiving around 1000 visits on a daily level without spending a single rupee on advertising,” co-Founder explains.
Why Holidify.com, another travel website?
Because it is NOT always about selling you packages and booking flights and tickets. It is also about inspiring you to travel. It is also about helping you find the right destinations to go for your next destination. It is also about giving you the right information about the place like activities, sightseeing options, actual photographs, etc. It is about making all the information available in a simple, structured and personalized manner.
Holidify is really an impressive startup with great idea. If you are a traveler, you should once visit the website and try what you can find here. I am sure you will love it.
