A lot of startups are aiming to digitize the travel industry. It started with the simple booking of travel tickets online and has slowly branched out into specific, useful areas such as last-minute hotel bookings and itinerary management. The latest startup to give it a shot is India’s Holidayen.
Holidayen is a travel startup that focuses on planning your trip for you, sort of like an online travel agent. The site offers packages with set prices that include travel, accommodation, and activities. Customers can select a destination and origin point and start planning a trip from there. The user then chooses travel and accommodation, as well as a schedule for activities that can be moved around as a traveler sees fit. Holidayen has a database of approximately 300 locations around the world and covers things like transportation, sights, activities and hotels.\
Tarun Madan, Utalka Mohanty, and Mitanshu Garg founded Holidayen after their own woes with planning their travels. “As travelers, we had always found trip planning to be a cumbersome, time consuming process. It took weeks of scouring the net and guidebooks to finalize travel plans.” says Mohanty.
Holidayen isn’t the first startup that wants to help automate your trip. Similar websites exist such as Gogobot, which recently added a new feature that lets you book hotels on the fly. Gogobot has mobile apps for iOS and Android, whereas Holidayen only has one for Android.
Holidayen is slightly different in that it also offers airline ticket booking and price comparisons, which Gogobot doesn’t.
The Holidayen team says that at an average of around 2,000 trips are planned each month on the service. Additional features are in the works, such as enhanced personalised options for booking flights and hotels, a revamped Android app, and a brand-new iOS app.
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