TravClan, a B2B Travel Platform aims to onboard more than two million travel agents/companies across more than 100 countries doing business of 10 billion dollars on the platform. Starting with just ten employees in October 2018, the company clocked INR 100 crore in sales run rate by December 2019. Even in the wake of the pandemic, TravClan continued growing and we are a 60-plus team today. Recently, the travel platform launched the B2B flight booking and hotel booking platform for agents. ET HospitalityWorld spoke to Arun Bagaria, Co-founder, TravClan to know more about the company.
ETHospitalityWorld (ETHW): Tell us about your business model
Arun Bagaria (AB): TravClan is a disruptive B2B Travel Platform bringing in the technology-driven transformation to the US $100 billion offline travel market in India and South-East Asia. TravClan empowers travel agents by helping them generate more business by building their online presence and enabling travel agents to book flights, hotels, holidays with suppliers across the world at best B2B prices. TravClan offers a number of advantages to traveling agents and helps them accelerate their growth as a service provider. The company provides agents with online stores that offer instant bookings and help them market their business on social media. It is a comprehensive B2B platform selling flights, hotels and packages. The company offers Fintech solutions for the travel agents such as overseas payments, enables credit, Forex cards and insurance etc.
ETHW: How has the pandemic impacted your business?
AB: The pandemic has made an adverse impact on the entire travel ecosystem. International tourism, especially from India, is at a standstill and at present, even domestic tourism is limited due to the second wave of the disease. However, we have been constantly progressing as a brand and building infrastructure, bringing travel agents and suppliers on board. We are preparing a robust B2B community that will stand to gain from the best prices and holistic services offered by TravClan. The future of travel is going to be primarily dependent on 2 factors: travel agents and digital technology and we are bringing these two factors together. In the wake of the pandemic, we continued to innovate and launched a platform where travel agents can setup their online website in a few clicks. Right now, we have recently launched a feature that allows customers to view vaccine availability info in their locality on agents website in an easy way.ETHW: How the platform is profitable for travel agents? How many do you have onboarded as of today?
AB: TravClan offers unmatched benefits and services for travel agents. We are empowering offline agents by providing them with a fully functional website to market their packages through social media, receive bookings and payments online. Furthermore, we also offer the best price deals on flights and hotels through direct access to suppliers. Receiving payments from customers and paying to suppliers digitally are two major challenges for all travel agents, and we have resolved these through our integrated payment solutions. Thus, TravClan has emerged as the one-stop platform that resolves all problems faced by travel agents and provides them with great growth opportunities for the future. We have built a strong content and community in travel by helping agents stay updated with travel news and upskill themselves by attending webinars hosted by various Tourism Boards on TravClan. These community led initiatives have helped us grow through word of mouth. We have already onboarded more than 10,000 travel agents and our aim is to take the number to 2 million plus in the years ahead.ETHW: What makes you stand out from others in the market?
AB: Our holistic product offering right from helping in lead generation to creating invoices and collecting feedback from customers and covering every aspect of the travel business, is unique and disruptive in the industry. Our technology is transforming the $100 billion-plus offline travel market in India and South East Asia by bringing technology to the travel agents in a seamless and holistic manner. Starting with WhatsApp groups in late 2018, TravClan has already emerged as a major B2B platform. It has become the platform of choice for travel agents and helps them generate leads online, create their website, planning packages and itineraries and offering the best prices for global hotel bookings as well as flight tickets. Unlike other aggregators and B2B players, TravClan is focused on empowering the travel agents and giving them technology-driven solutions to fuel their growth. We also offer Fintech solutions for payments overseas to the suppliers and for receiving payments from their customers.
ETHW: What are your expansion plans?
AB: TravClan has shown incredible growth right from the outlet. Starting with just 10 employees in October 2018, the company clocked INR 100 crore in sales run rate by December 2019. Even in the wake of the pandemic, TravClan continued growing and we are a 60-plus team today. Recently, we launched our B2B flight booking and hotel booking platform for agents. TravClan aims to onboard more than 2 million travel agents/companies across 100+ countries doing business of $10 billion-plus on the platform. We will become the biggest B2B travel company in the world and enable all our partners to harness their maximum growth and revenue generation potential.