TripThirsty – TripAdvisor for Adventure Experiences

Adventure Trips are picking up fast in today’s generation, after being bored by standing enough in front of monuments for pictures. We all want to experience things and create good memories to cherish. If we wish to plan an adventure trip, the options are spread between several meetup.com groups, a few facebook groups and many websites. You could spend all your time googling, and still not find all the amazing options – wildlife photography workshops, reptile handling, women-only camping trips, and tons more. TripThirsty,  a Bangalore based startup aims to be a one-stop directory for adventure travel.

TripThirsty is founded by Kingsley Joseph,Sundar Lakshmanan,Anenth Guru and Sandeep Bhaskar. It currently features trips, hikes and adventures from Bangalore. The layout is very intuitive and the trips featured look very alluring. Once you decide to go on a particular trip, the website neatly takes you to the trip provider’s page for registration. A very interesting feature of TripThirsty is to enable FB users plan a trip using the Events feature. When a Facebook connected user expresses interest in one of the deals, they can invite their other TripThirsty friends to their fresh trip plan in just a click. These Trip Plans are by default visible only to friends and the user can choose to make it secret.  TripThirsty initially started off with wishlists, which were replaced by these adventure travel listings.

TripThirsty not only enables the end user to find fantastic  experiential travel deals, but also helps to promote micro-entrepreneurship in this sector. Currently, the team subscribes to and follows a wide variety of sources, to find and list the best trips around. “For many providers who want to focus on the product and leave the marketing to us, we are simply the easiest way to set up a web page and have users participate in it”, says Kingsley Joseph.

TripThirsty plans to make revenues by providing  lead sales to trip organizers based on customer requirements, Verified Listing Fees which also provide advanced analytics and by enabling online bookings for integrated providers. The team plans to raise funds to support expansion to other cities, add sales staff, advertising & traffic growth and investments in technology to help integrate better with organizers.

Kingsley Joseph recently demoed at Startup Saturday, Bangalore. Sharing his experience, he says, “The Startup Saturday experience was deeply useful to us from 2 perspectives – 1. We were able to interact directly with a group of early adopters who care about travel. This really helped us understand our market at a personal, intuitive level as well as gave us some good directions in which to grow the product. 2. Nearly everyone at the meetup signed up for TripThirsty.com, which was both, great validation, as well as giving us a fantastic seed audience.”

TTP’s take on TripThirsty

Experiential  travel is an Industry that will see huge growth in the coming years. Aggregating Tavel Providers and providing them with completely automated interface for marketing and charging their trip could be their best selling point.  It would be good if TripThirsty can start adding more cities soon, which would help them users across the country.