For most of us, travel is a deeply personal experience. The travel industry has been witnessing multiple innovations that made the customer journey easier right from booking platforms to the AirBnB kind of experience for budget travellers.
However, on the other side of the travel experience, are travel companies and individual agents. And that’s there Pathfndr is bringing in innovation.
Pathfndr, a SaaS startup founded in 2015 by Varun Gupta, is leading the charge. Pathfndr is the “Shopify+ for travel”, an AI-powered Travel Operating System for Travel Agents and Travel Influencers to start their own digital businesses in minutes.
Pathfndr is helping travel agents get dynamism and personalization in their offering to accompany their promise of service. This is enabled by their integration of the best-in-class global supply of travel inventory, their recommendation engines which personalize fo key travel questions such as where to go, how to get there, where to stay and what to do, and their “shopify” type configurations based environment including a drag-and-drop UI Builder.
Pathfndr also provides a P2P Marketplace of offline inventory, allowing an agent in Bangalore to exchange contracted travel content in the city with an agent in Sydney.
Varun Gupta was inspired to start Pathfndr after seeing that online travel search haven’t really changed in over 15 years. Pathfndr provides a way to launch customized travel platforms with ~50 site configurations as well as a drag-and-drop UI Builder, an intelligent search that was earlier outside the reach of the “individual travel agent”, and a peer-to-peer marketplace for offline contracted inventory.
Pathfndr has received numerous awards and recognition, including being among the 4 best travel startups globally picked by Skyscanner, runner up at Israel’s Eilat Travel Tech competition, NASSCOM’s Emerge 50 Awardee, and winner of Startup Competition hosted by World Tourism Forum Lucerne.
Pathfndr’s revenue model includes software subscriptions for the platform license, transaction revenue, and software add-ons. In the short term, the team is working with both Travel Agencies/ Advisors as well as Travel Influencers and Micro-Corporates.
The ambitious dream for the team is to have 100,000+ Pathfndr-powered sites in the next 3 years leading to a $100 million ARR.
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