Aashish Chhiller

17048: Dorm 21

Travel Search and Discovery

Business Plan

Introduction
Oscar Wilde once said, I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. Modern life does not afford
us the luxury of day to day changes, leading to a certain sense of ennui. We each have our daily grind, we punch
in, we punch out and repeat ad infinitum. We were all born with the soul of an explorer, an adventurer. In our
race to automate and improve every facet of our lives, we have surely moved up Mazlovs pyramid but have
also eliminated almost all sources of adventure from our lives. The easiest source of adventure left to us now is,
travel.

It is no wonder then that the travel industry in India is set to become a 20 billion dollar behemoth by 2020 with
the online travel market accounting for 45% of all transactions by 2020 (up from 12%). Foreign tourism growth
(currently at 4.4%) but is expected to explode with the recently launched E-tourist visa facility. In 2011 alone we
had 560 million Indian tourists and 5m foreign tourists in India. This figure is expected to grow by 22% year on
year. E-travel sites provide the peace of mind of pre-booking as well as transparency. In the Indian industry
specifically most major e-travel companies have started to pivot towards a one-stop shop model. This still
leaves the hidden first step, search and discovery of a destination and itinerary planning onto the user.

Product Description
Users will be provided a portal and chat-bot solution tailored to their interests to advise and effectively
serve as a discovery tool. Post discovery users will be able to add locations and POIs to their itineraries.
Users will be suggested offers from partner sites to provide travel and stay options as per their
itineraries.

Revenue Streams
We will assume a market share of 30% in the travel search and discovery sector and thus target 5 million
unique users per month. The product will have three major revenue streams. Affiliate partnerships with
e-travel websites would be pay for converted leads. Assuming, 10% user conversion on our product and
a further 17% user conversion on parent website (industry average), projected revenue would touch Rs
24.6 cr/year (Rs 236-280/converted lead) increasing at a rate of 29% YoY (pegged against industry
growth figures).
Selling advertisement space on our portal with average Indian CTR of 0.12%, and an average CPC of Rs
24/click (77% less than US average), would yield a projected revenue of Rs 1.7cr per year, with 100 ads
per month.
For user categories like thrill seekers, adventure lovers and trekking enthusiasts we will have a
subscription package to uncover locations tagged as secret. With an initial subscription model of Rs 499
per year for 10 such POIs and with a conversion of 10% we can expect a yield of Rs 1.5 cr per annum.
This market segment is currently growing at a rate of 200% YoY and thus is expected to play a major role
in the future of the company.

Conclusion
With recent advances in AI, along with open source tools like TensorFlow, it has become increasingly
easy to convert un-organized data into information. This has led to a proliferation of startups that aim to
curate discovery instead of just display data. This is evidenced by the rapid growth of bots, product
suggestion startups etc. This tech has yet to be implemented in the field of location discovery specifically
for travel. My belief is that a company built from the ground up with AI systems in place will be able to
achieve this faster and better than traditional companies with a focus on data delivery.