Three IITians have come together to help the Incredible India site of the tourism ministry through their own tripigator.com. Incredible India was launched in 2002 under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Tripigator is designed to aggregate information about cities, tourist spots, transportation, hotels, culture, weather and visa applications. It will cater to domestic and global travellers.
Karteek Narumanchi, Mukul Garg and Piyush Grover from the 2010 batch of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, spent three years developing the 'travel planning engine', to be also made available on the Incredible India site.
Narumanchi said, "The idea came to us because of the problems we would face browsing 20 sites to gather information while planning our travel. None has developed a product like this."
The site would seek inputs such as timeline, budget, areas of interest and destination and create a range of plans and rank those according to user experience. There is also a tie-up with TripAdvisor to source content material for reviewing destinations and hotels.
"We will collaborate more with TripAdvisor. For now, we are testing the waters and gathering a customer base before we expand," said Narumanchi.
At the moment, the trio runs Tripigator along with a few freelancers. Going forward, the company would approach investors and make revenues through advertisements since the business model does not entail any booking facility.
All the three co-founders worked on this venture alongside their corporate jobs - Garg and Narumanchi in HSBC and Grover in Novell Inc - for the first couple of years, investing all their savings.
"Our service is available for free. As we grow we will get into international destinations as well and find more ways of making money," said Garg.
Tripigator was selected by the tourism ministry as its official travel partner after inviting expression of interest from various industry players earlier this year.
"It is a non-commercial website and with introduction of this technology, travelling to and within India will become easier to plan. The process will be more enjoyable for all tourists," said Parvez Dewan, secretary, Ministry of Tourism.
