Pickyourtrail offers personalised travel plans using a special algorithm

Pickyourtrail is a travel tech start-up that helps travellers plan and book multi-country vacations online

Avid travellers Hari Ganapathy and Srinath Shankar put in more than two months to fully craft their vacation to Europe in 2012. This included end-to-end planning, bookings, and visa processing.
 
During the trip they met other travellers who were all on packaged tours and after interacting with them, the duo understood they (the fellow travellers) were rushed between destinations and their urge to find new experience was left unfulfilled. And this knowledge sparked the idea of co-founding Pickyourtrail, a travel tech start-up that helps travellers plan and book multi-country vacations online. The company was founded in 2014.
 
Recently the start-up raised $3 million in Series A funding, led by Kumar Vembu, chief executive officer of Go Frugal, and Shyam Sekhar of iThought. Rajagopal Subramanian (Entrust Family Office) and Girish Mathrubootham, founder & CEO of Freshworks, also participated.

 

The fresh capital will be used for product innovation, scaling up the proprietary technology platform, expansion of the technical team and creating brand awareness. The online travel company also plans to open stores in tier II and tier III towns to cater for its targeted customers. It plans to start with one or two stores initially, in 12 to 15 months.
 
“We are a one-stop shop for all travel requirements. Flights, hotels, activities, transfers, train, visa arrangement, insurance — name anything and we have it available on our product for the traveller’s convenience. Usually planning an itinerary takes about 24-48 hours, but using our website, it can be done in under 45 seconds,” says Ganapathy, adding, people usually hop 38 websites to create an itinerary and then book using 11-13 sites. 

 
Pickyourtrail’s proprietary comfort score algorithm takes into account over 40 factors like duration, travel time and ratings to build personalised itineraries that travellers can further customise. Post booking, travellers use its app to not just keep track of bookings, but also get real-time information on flight and weather updates, restaurant recommendations and on-trip chat support.
 
“I believe that our algorithms across personalisation, routing and price matching are an industry first in their approach and output. Our end goal is to make Pickyourtrail synonymous with customised international vacations,” says Shankar, co-founder of the company. The start-up considers everyone right from Thomas Cook, Cox and Kings, MakeMyTrip to even self-bookers as competition.

 
The firm is seeing an opportunity in the total outbound market in India, which should be about $40 billion by 2020. As per a recent WTO report, the projected number of outbound trips in 2020 is 50 million. A report by a leading OTA in India, the total outbound “online” market is $3.3 billion.
 
More than 10,000 travellers from 14 countries have used Pickyourtrail’s services to plan their travel in the last five years. It targets about 50,000 outbound tourists using its platform by end of 2022 and eyes 5X growth in revenue by then. The company covers about 400 cities in the world.

 
“We get commissions from our partners with whom we book. Our service fee component is auto-generated by the algorithm; it is anywhere between 0.2 and 1 per cent of the overall trip,” Ganapathy adds.