Holiday IQ, which says it is India’s answer to TripAdvisor but with a local twist, is setting up base in Singapore to expand into the region.
According to Hari Nair, founder & CEO of Holiday IQ, it’s taken four years for the company to get to where it is now ready to expand.
It has one million visitors a week to the site and 12,500 hotels listed of which 8,000 has reviews – and now Hari feels it is time for the company to move out of India and apply its hybrid media model designed for emerging markets to the rest of Asia.
Hari says a lot of lessons were learnt at start-up, one of which was doing things the Western way and taking a model that might have worked in the West and planting it in India was wrong.
“We learnt the hard way that everything is different in India and we had to learn to adapt our model to emerging markets. It took us four years to figure it out. This is the IP we now have and we wouldn’t give it up for the world,” he said.
Pitching itself as an intelligent holiday planning site, HolidayIQ carries three types of content – own-generated editorial, user generated (about 70% of content) and commercial in the form of supplier listings.
“The mix of these three types of content gives comprehensive content coverage for the user. In India, content requirements are different from US and Europe.
“We believe people want a blend of content – facts from our own editorial and opinions from user reviews. There is no battle between the two, they complement each other.”
What Holiday IQ does, said Hari, is give “cultural context” – reviews written by Indians for Indian travellers. “Malaysians or Singaporeans searching for hotels would trust reviews written by other Malaysians and Singaporeans,” he said.
He plans to roll out Holiday IQ in the English- speaking markets of Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong initially.
In Holiday IQ’s business model, half of its revenues come from advertising and sponsorship and the other from lead generation and referrals.
“We generate enquiries from travellers and we match these with travel suppliers who are not online but we feel will be the right people to fulfil those requests,” said Hari. “The travel agent then pays for that lead.”
He said the site generates 1,000 enquiries a day. “The enquiry engine is built on the site and we plan to put it into Facebook and other social media sites.”
He said, “There are a lot of traditional players outside the online loop. There are also a lot of people researching online but not buying online. We find that there is growth in people researching online but a flatter growth in people buying online.
“This is why we decided to build an enquiry model – to enable travellers to connect with longtail and specialist experiences which are harder to find online.”
Hari believes two broad audiences are emerging in the online travel market – North American and Europe, and emerging.
“The behaviour is completely different. In the West, there are lots of new applications and trip planning tools. In emerging markets, we haven’t even got 1.0 right yet, let alone Web 2.0.
“We haven’t even got the content model right. We are positioning ourselves in the emerging market and we have the capability to build all the tools.’
It is also in the emerging markets that he believes mobile will play a bigger role. “We will go onto mobile faster than in the West – and I am not talking necessarily about iPhone applications. We find in markets such as India, text messages work better.”
He is confident Holiday IQ’s enquiry model will work well in other Asian markets. “India is possibly the most fragmented travel trade market in the world. If we can get travel agents to give us money for the added value we bring, we can do anything,” he laughed.
Holiday IQ, at start-up, was funded by founders Hari Nair & Vinu Krishnan and later topped up by a group of angel investors. In its first round of institutional financing, it raised equity from Erasmic Venture Fund. Recently, Bennett Coleman & Company (owners of the Times of India group) subscribed to a substantial minority interest.
Hari said he was seeking funding – to the tune of US$500,000 – to kick off its expansion in Singapore.
Featured image credit (Computer work): Ockra/iStock
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