Let’s travel the KMPH way

With the advent of digitalization and the new technological era every service that one craves for or needs is just a click away of the mouse. Be it e-commerce, to booking movie tickets or travel tickets to other necessary services and product, everything is done online. One such sector that has highly grown over the past few years is the travel and tourism sector. And this drastic change has come about due to the way people are perceiving tourism and their approach to new ways of travel and adventure. People always want the best out of anything. Similarly in regard of tours and travel people always want something out of the box, a more integrated approach to it.

Like any other online travel and tourism portal KMPH aims to do just what we want, or may be a little more that adds a cherry to our cakes! It allows users to explore destinations on self-defined criteria basis, collect detailed information on those chosen destination and arrange for commutes and day-wise planned routes surrounding stays, give updates about the places to visit and activities to indulge in.

“People love to explore, and it is a wonderful thing to be able to create a fully-loaded trip on one’s own. So there was a market gap,” says Amit Sinha Co-founder KMPH Trips.

So what set apart KMPH from others?
Today most travel and tourism portals offer a very rigid set of services for one and all. One that does not offer any kind of customization that would benefit the traveler, and thus the traveler himself/herself has to sit and do his/her own research. Then why at all will anybody opt for third party services if the customer needs to do everything from the scratch? KMPH goes that extra mile to help travelers explore a wide range of destinations using the map base destination explorer based on different parameters. The parameters are origin, geography, type and category.

After a customer is done with finalizing their favorite destination, they are provided with detailed and in-depth information about that particular place which the customer can go through and get an overall idea about the location. All this is done with the help of pictures in the form of a menu along with a destination guide that covers factors like history, festivals, food, weather, sightseeing opportunities, adventure sports or activities if any and the best time to visit the place. Customers can also opt for the hotels they want to be put in and the mode of transport they would like. One can even create a day-wise boarding, sightseeing, commuting, and activity plan as well. Customers benefit a lot from Crowd-sourced knowledge by acquiring access to trip previously created by other users and further customizing and modifying to suit their needs. “We even have a single checkout and payment for multi-hop trip plans comprising different travel products,” says Amit.

How KMPH came into existence?
The co-founders Amit Sinha and Vikram Kohli met through a common friend and while discussing things related to travel, this idea of building a comprehensive trip-planning portal struck them and they never gave a second thought to it after that. It was not that much a big challenge from them as both of them had enough experience in hiring and managing teams in addition with updated expertise in their respective fields. Amit Sinha was a versatile banker and has been part of ICICI Bank, HDFC, Pidilite, Reliance Infocomm, Thermax and GE Money. Vikram Kohli has worked for Tech Mahindra, and holds a PGCBM from XLRI Jamshedpur and Master in Computers. The company is self-funded so far. We are looking for financial investors to propel further growth,” says Amit.

There are over 200 visits to the website per day and over 100 users have created trips on the website. It is not a limited service but anyone with an internet connection and interest to travel can create a trip. So far the team has updated content on 178 destinations in the country itself and 145 international spots. The team is constantly working together in making a huge shift from 178 to 200 in India and 145 to 500 in abroad by the end of this year.

Challenges
Creating original content for travel has been tricky and choosing the right vendors for sourcing services is also not easy. Though temporary solutions were made but for further improvements and long term benefits, work is underway.

The market
“Our top line revenue is projected at four per cent of the business booked,” says Amit. The main revenue that is yielded is earned through commissions from bus bookings and mark-ups at the time of hotel and transport booking. All products are booked only after a trip is created and finalized.

Tourism is gaining a big ground in our country and the government too is taking great initiative in promoting the same. The online travel market is thus growing at a much faster rate than the overall of 10.2 percent. It is passion for some, relaxation for the other, and a bread earner for few more. It is not only thrilling and fun but is a great way of enhancing one’s knowledge. So why not take it to a much greater level through various online portals like KMPH and others and make our economy reach its pinnacle!

“The domestic travel market is still largely unorganized, and thus ripe for innovative disruption. Adventure travel is another emerging trend. We plan to organise this segment and bring it to the online space. We’ve already begun groundwork on this,” concludes Amit.

According to reports, travel in India is estimated at close to $70 billion. Of this, $11 billion is online.