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Thrillophilia is making experiential travel mainstream

Travel by no means is a small industry for Indians. The country is brought up on the lure of the annual pilgrimage to a new destination each summer when the schools close for vacations. Be it visiting family and friends in new towns or high end travel to other countries, we are willing to spend money for it. A survey commissioned on behalf of Trip Advisor goes on to say that Indians will spend more on vacations this year and within the next 20 years the number of Indians flying abroad would peak six times the current figure.

But how does it connect with the three year old Bangalore based Thrillophilia and its co-founder Abhishek Daga? Avinash Raghava and I had a freewheeling chat with Thrillophilia to find out about them. Read on the excerpts:

What is Thrillophilia? 

Thrillophilia is a three year startup in the adventure travel space. They focus on solving the pain point of finding and experiencing unique activities and things to do in India. Enabling adventure seekers to move beyond the hotel-as-a-destination to experience what the region has to offer by focusing on itineraries as exciting as kayaking in Goa to walking tours in old city of Mysore.

How did it all start?

Travel had always been a passion for Abhishek and his co-founder Chitra. Who would then seek to travel and explore new destinations in and around Karnataka owing to their Bangalore jobs. But the problem they faced while planning for getaways was beyond finding the right destinations extending to seeking right vendor.

What began as a simple blog in 2009, Thrillophilia concentrated on providing content on ‘what to do’ based on their own experience and recommendations. With enough content and traction on the blog they slowly evolved Thrillophilia by 2010 as a side project with a small team consisting of sales leads. The initial focus and traction came from corporates and bigger brands who were now routinely seeking offbeat experiences for their team building efforts. Thrillophilia seemed to fit in perfectly with its offering.

Enter 2011 Abhishek mentions about breaking even, the entire efforts up until this point had been self funded. With a cash positive nature of their business they also raised angel funding from an NRI investor to help with the growth.

Where is Thrillophilia right now?

Abhishek claims 200% year on year for their startup with 400 tours and 500 experiences live right now with another 1000+ coming up in the next few months. Even though corporates still dominate that number is fast decreasing as the offering and the focus shifts from a B2B to a B2C product. For Indians the most popular destinations tend to be in Goa and Karnataka whereas for the international travelers Rajasthan and Kerala catch their fancy.

Thrillophilia recently launched a market place to get vendors under an umbrella banner and increase the product offering, a move which could be beneficial for the repeat customers on the platform. With nearly 600 vendors onboard Thrillophilia is aiming to meet the milestone of 30,000 travelers and 3500 experiences in the current year. Ground based travel is what dominates the offerings, but water based experiences still matter at 12% with airborne activities coming at 3% on Thrillophilia.  


Next on target?

With a dedicated scout team to help match and vet the outdoor offerings, Thrillophilia will spend the coming time to strengthen its marketplace offerings with the vendors many of whom are still standalone operators relying on voice/sms for their business. The other efforts will go towards online campaigns over social media and repeat customers.

Competition in the space

To say Thrillophilia is the sole startup building a product in the travel space would be wrong. The experiential travel space is heating up with competition coming from Delhi based Travel Triangle and TLabs backed iExperience with GSF-500 Startups backed Tushky all adding their healthy mix of spin to the sector.

Hope you give Thrillophilia a spin for your next adventure holiday. I for one am definitely pinging Abhishek for recommendations for my kayaking holiday!

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Top 10 things to look for a digital marketing roadmap.

Today the biggest challenge for any of us as entrepreneurs is not to build kickass products or services but to reach out to the relevant target audience. Many of products fail not because they were not awesome but because of poor marketing strategies. I have myself made terrible mistakes which costed me and my company a lot but it’s just part of a learning experience and entrepreneurial curve. Lot of people think digital marketing or social media marketing is free or easy but I fell it’s the make or break for any company whose customers are online. It needs the same amount of attention and effort you had put in while building your product / services. It needs a lot of thinking, prioritization, knowledge and off course a lot time investment. Today there is so much noise on digital mediums that you need to be remarkable to stand out or youwill be just one out of many. Here are my top 10 learnings from the many digital campaigns I ran.

  1. Map your efforts to the end goal: Most of the time startups do not have a clear end goal in mind and they map the entire campaign to a wrong goal. What is you end goal? Drive traffic? What is your KPI which will make you successful this quarter? Does your organization’s goal is to drive sales or build user base for this quarter. Once you decide on your KPI for this quarter do not change it. Stick to it. Do everything to achieve your goals, tweak strategy to achieve it but not the goals.
  2. Don’t be scared of spending: Most of the digital campaigns are bound to fail. Just that one of your campaigns failed doesn’t mean that platform is not good for you. It just takes a fair amount of money and time to optimize your campaigns and make them successful. I have typically spend around 2Cr. on Facebook platform in last 4 years and still may of my campaigns fail today. If you want fast results hire an expert of the platform.
  3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Diversify your mediums to generate leads or traffic. Typically any medium should not drive more than 20% of your sales. It becomes really lucrative to go deeper and deeper into a medium when we taste success on it. I have learnt this hard way. There was time when Thrillophilia was driving 80% of the traffic through Search engines and then suddenly the website was hacked by Chinese hacker who did lot of artificial link building. We realized this 3 months later when we got penalized by Google and traffic dropped to 1/10. We had a nightmare on sales side and had to diversify in hurry which really isn’t the best approach.
  4. Build smart email lists: Emails are still going to exist for next 10 years so it’s a good idea to invest on them. The more you know your customers, what they want and better segregated your email lists are, the lesser you will spam your consumer and the more leads you will generate. Keep a close eye on subscription/ unsubscribing and see what drives them.
  5. UI is the key: Drive emotions. Lot of impulsive buying happens over internet. People get carried away with emotions, drive them to do what you really wanted them to do. A good visual can be 5 times more powerful than an average one. No other thing can have such an effect on your campaigns. I again say drive emotions. It can be anger, humor, inquisitiveness etc.
  6. Have a short term strategy and a long term strategy: Your short term strategy could be have a good user base to feed your platform or generate leads to feed your sales team. Paid advertising might be really helpful in doing that. Your long term strategy should be to build a sustainable long term engine based on active user base, repeat customers, reviews or organic traffic.
  7. FANS and no fans: When I talk to many startup friends they ask for tips of building fan base seeing that we at Thrillophilia have done a good job in building a 32000+ Fan base on Facebook. It’s just the most false metrics to look at. We have never ever done a single campaign to increase our Fanbase. It’s not going to take you anywhere unless you plan to sell your company to a not so tech guy. A better metrics could be active users on page, virality of posts or traffic on website from Facebook.
  8. Keep a close eye on 24 hour results: It’s very imp to know what the world is thinking about your company at this point of time. I am just addicted to 24 hour results of keyword “Thrillophilia” on Google. A simple way to do it is go to Google and type in your brand name. In Search tools select in “Past 24 hours” This will show you the results of your brand in the last 24 hours over net indexed by Google. It will help you to identify if some is talking negative about your brand or if you just had a fake review from a competitor. Also set you your key Google alerts.
  9. Lessen up the dependency on other platforms: Let’s say today your 80% of the traffic is driven by Google and Facebook. How can you bring it to 50%? Building better email lists, having more repeat traffic, people who love you and are addicted to your website, affiliates etc. You never know if Google of FB will exist after 5 years but I assume you are building a company that probably will.
  10. Build relationships: Nothing works better than this. Start helping people in your ecosystem. If you design T-shirts design it for free for a NGO, a startup or for a big company. If you run a blog, give links to other good websites. Take your vendors for a dinner. Soon your 24 hours result will start getting better. We recently did a camp for Make a Difference, and yesterday they posted a Video on Youtube with our special mention – Let people talk good about you and enjoy the ride. In the end you were here to disrupt something and build something better.
Guest Post by Abhishek, Co-Founder of Thrillophilia.com, the biggest activity travel website of India and comes with 6+ years of digital marketing experience. Before Co-Founding Thrillophilia he has helped national and international companies like Biocon, Flying machine, Discovery Channel to build their digital marketing presence