How do you build a travel business for how India actually travels?
Ritwik Khare, Founder of Elivaas, and Pranav Dangi, Founder of The Hosteller, have taken very different paths and built businesses meant to upgrade India’s travel.
Their conversation reveals what it takes to understand travellers, make different bets and scale in a category that never sleeps with very different takes.
The Opportunity they Saw
The Hosteller started with a simple idea, travellers don’t always want to travel alone. Hostels give them the opportunity to create community and social experiences while they travel.
Elivaas saw a different opportunity. Families and groups of friends wanted to spend more time together while travelling, get to know the destination better and have experiences together.
The use cases are different, but both businesses are looking at upgrading the way people travel and stay at hotels and villas. The difference in the customer they serve also shapes the experience they create.
Community vs Private Experiences
For Ritwik, one of the biggest strengths of the hostel model is its ability to create community at scale.
A hostel can bring 100 people together in one room or building and create a shared experience. That is difficult to replicate in a villa unless multiple bookings come together.
Elivaas is built around a different kind of experience. Families and groups of friends come together, get more intimate while travelling and experience a destination together.
The two models operate differently, but they both solve for how people want to travel.
One Customer Can Change the Business
As the business grows, customer feedback can also change the way you operate.
For The Hosteller, feedback from a female guest changed how the company approached safety.
Female safety became a first priority. The company introduced SOS buttons, immediate resolution and female-exclusive dorm rooms.
Technology also helps optimise bed allocation. If there are five males and one female in a six-bed dorm, the platform tries to either show the female that there are five males in the dorm or shift her to another dorm.
One customer conversation led to changes across the experience.
Travel Is Easy to Start. Hard to Scale.
Finding the opportunity is only the start. Building the business around it gets harder as you grow.
Pranav’s biggest lie in year one was that building a hostel business would be easy.
He started The Hosteller as a hobby while working with a corporate. After starting three hostels, he thought he could manage it. But moving from three properties to ten and more made the business tougher.
The industry never sleeps. It is a 24/7, 365-day business.
Ritwik had a different starting point. He had a co-founder he deeply trusted and valued. Having someone give a second or third opinion gave him peace of mind when things became stressful.
Both founders had different starting points. But had different takes on raising capital.
How Much Money Do You Really Need?
Ritwik believes founders should focus first on building a high-quality company that deeply solves a problem. If the problem is being solved well, he believes funding takes care of itself.
His advice is simple: don’t make funding the biggest stress of the entrepreneurial journey.
Pranav’s advice comes from his experience of raising three structured rounds. His advice is to always raise for 125% and not 75%. If you need ₹100, raise ₹125 and not ₹75.
The additional bandwidth gives founders the comfort to experiment, try, pilot, fail and succeed.
Why Follow the Industry Playbook?
Elivaas chose not to follow the usual approach of going deep into one city before expanding to the next.
Instead, the company worked on three to four cities at a time and continued launching two to three more cities the following month.
That approach helped Elivaas launch in 45 cities in 24 months. For Ritwik, it also created immense learning, scale and customer repeat options.
The Hosteller made a different choice around customer engagement.
The company engages with guests right after they book rather than waiting until they land or check in. This creates an opportunity to offer mobility solutions and experiences, upsell and remove doubts from the customer’s mind.
The thinking behind both approaches comes back to solving the problem deeply. But it needs strong infrastructure to keep the business running smoothly.
The Infrastructure Behind Travel Growth
A growing travel business needs more than the right customer experience. It needs the infrastructure to turn bookings into completed payments.
PayU helps travel businesses accept payments and drive customer conversion with:
Payment Gateway: Accept 150+ payment modes with industry-leading success rates, 99.98% uptime and seamless integration across web and app platforms.
Know more about PayU solutions
No One Way to Scale
Elivaas and The Hosteller are building for different travel use cases and have made different choices on how to grow.
Elivaas went against the grain and expanded across cities quickly. The Hosteller focused on community, safety and engaging guests right after they booked.
But there is one thought they both come back to: whatever you’re solving, solve it like a world-class company and go deep.
There is no single formula for scale. How you build depends on what you are solving and who you are solving it for.
PayU powers businesses like Elivaas and The Hosteller, so founders can focus on building what’s next.
