‘Offline mobile guide’ for 1300 places
With MOT’s emphasis on domestic tourism, Dr Lalit K Panwar, Secretary, MOT, recently launched HolidayIQ’s offline mobile guide, offering information on over 1300 destinations. We spoke to Hari Nair, Founder & CEO, HolidayIQ.
Each destination guide will contain details on hotels, sightseeing options, etc, allowing the user to download and access traveller reviews and maps for on-the-go access, even while offline.
Telling us about the mobile guide, Hari Nair, Founder & CEO, HolidayIQ, said, “The product that we have launched is built on the whole mobile revolution that is coming to India. We have built a mobile guide and the most interesting aspect of the guide is that you can get entire information about 1300 tourism destinations in India on your phone, complete native-mobile experience without having the internet. Our constant battle within our team was to provide access to this large database of information on-the-go, where internet accessibility is the biggest challenge.”
He added, “So even if you are in the furthermost corner of India, wherever there is no internet, you will not be lost. The information that is there on Holiday IQ will be in your hands about that destination even without the internet. It’s a revolutionary new approach and we are covering every destination in India for tourism.”
Nair further said, “With issues of internet connectivity during travel, especially when travelling in rural pockets of the country, jungles, deserts, hilly areas etc, the offline guides will certainly prove to be every traveller’s boon.”
Talking from the travel agents point of view, he said, “We find that even travel agents and their employees find the guide incredibly useful. That is because they are able to get the information that they are looking for. The information on guide is collected from millions of real travellers in India. The whole Indian travel industry, leisure travel industry and tourism industry turns now to Holiday IQ for the information they are looking for.”
Telling us about the revenue model for Holiday IQ, he said, “The business model for Holiday IQ is very simple, we collect all our information from actual travellers. We do not pay them to write this, they are all part of our community, they write voluntarily. We now have 3 million, ie 30 lakh travellers who are now a part of our travel community. They write for us for free.” How we make money, is through all those consumers who come to our website, to plan holidays and after researching, are interested to make bookings. We connect them either to online travel agencies or off line travel agencies. We connect to more than 15 OTAs who do online booking for hotels. We also have 1000 off- line traditional travel agents across India on our network. We make money when we pass on customers to OTAs and offline travel agents.”