Angel investor Hyderabad Angels funds the growing India based online travel company Thrillophilia.com

BANGALORE - Hyderabad Angels, iLabs Venture Capital Fund, Navlok Ventures and CIIE(IIM A) have decided to buy an undisclosed amount of stake in one of the largest travel curators of the country, Thrillophilia.com.

Headquartered in Bangalore, the company has its presence in 72 cities and has alliances with 450 regional service providers.  The company has divested an undisclosed stake in an angel funding round for an amount of 200,000 USDs to Hyderabad Angels.

Pradeep Mittal, the lead investor in this deal, said that the 'activity-travel' segment is the third largest segment in the travel industry after hotel and air travel. He further added that not only individuals but also organisations are looking forward to exploring outdoor learning experiences merging fun and leisure with corporate learning.

Recently, Thrillophilia.com started focussing on providing short-duration experiences and things to do across different destinations. This segment is gaining immense popularity within the travel and tourism spectrum. Co-founder of Thrillophilia.com, Abhishek Daga, said, "Our primary target is to include 6,000 experiences by December and serve one lakh experience hours a month towards the last quarter of 2014. Our main USP lies in our strong outdoor team which does detailed ground-level research on the local vendors and travels across destinations to curate and verify experiences."

He further added that the biggest challenge today lies in real time inventory management because most of the regional vendors are not connected to the system at all times. However with the platform being released phase by phase, the company would address such issues and make the entire system infallible by 2014.

Raghu Bathina from Hyderabad Angels said, "Thrillophilia.com currently caters to more than 2,200 customers a month and has grown 200 per cent year after year.  The market trend is changing from regular sight-seeing travel to activity-based and experiential tours. People prefer to have a regional touch in their holidays. Thrillophilia curates such off-beat experiences for its travellers and provides these not only at a phenomenal quality but also with an assured customer support."

Chitra Gurnani Daga, Co-founder and CEO of Thrillophilia, added, "With this platform, we are providing a huge inventory of experiences and activities to travellers. The user is no longer restricted to booking long tours and planned itineraries and instead he/she can opt for short experiences such as a one-hour elephant ride, a night camp in a forest, a royal dinner at a palace or a micro light flight tour. In India, there aren't many travel portals that solve the problem of booking experiences in real time for travellers. Moreover, the trend of using an online portal to book such experiences is in its nascent stages. Many of our corporate customers who have been the initial adopters have loved these short experiences and we are confident that the trend would take shape, thereby, revolutionising the activity travel industry in the country."

Sourced: TravelDailyNews