Interview with Nitin Dikshit Founder & CEO ‘ZipTrrip’
Meet Nitin Dikshit
Ziptrrip by Wayfarers Technologies Pvt Ltd is the brainchild of me – Nitin Dikshit with over 20 years of experience in various aspects of the travel domain. I have spearheaded various roles at the national level in both Corporate and leisure travel ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction.
I will be responsible for the scaling & value-driving alliances. I will also be leading our efforts in contracting with various service provides.
Q. Explain more about ‘Ziptrrip’ What makes you special?
India pre-covid had corporate travel close to $32 Bn with almost 65% of this managed by travel agents offline while providing only booking services for flights, hotels, bus, trains etc. So a very big unorganized market.
The challenge faced by us was how to develop a platform that would have not only this service but also many more features. For example, almost all the companies who travel, have travel policies for their employees. However, after each trip, it is to be manually verified.
We solved this using modular technology so that employees can only see flights, hotels that they are allowed to book.
Employees often come from a 4-day sales meet/ expo with a ton of receipts for food, local conveyance & other miscellaneous bills.
They then have to fill forms and attach the physical invoices to it and submit often spending around 3 hours on this. We have features to store it digitally while travelling. When employee finishes with the trip they just click a single button to submit if for their claims.No chasing down invoices at the end of the a month or manually verifying if the flight and hotel fall under the employees travel policy.
Ziptrrip has it all.
Covid has been everyone’s biggest challenge and travel is no exception. We are using this period as a welcome break to add more features and partnering up with companies to provide Travel credit cards, insurance, reward points to employees booking under their travel policies.
In long run, we want to create a monetization model of “Pay as you save” or as we call it internally “Value-driven margins” where we want to do away with fixed convenience fees which is existing in the market for many decades and only charge our customers if they were able to save some bit through Ziptrrip. We want to be called as Travel partners instead of agents or OTAs.
Q. How did you think about Ziptrrip?
In the current Indian market scenario, corporates end up paying 20% more on their travel-related expenses due to inefficiency in the system which includes manual interventions for booking and expense management due to non-digital interfaces, no travel policy, leakages in the system for travel reimbursement; no real-time visibility to corporate on their travel expenses.
We are aiming to slash down these leakages by creating THE EVERYTHING PLATFORM FOR ALL CORPORATE TRAVEL NEEDS – Ziptrrip. A travel booking and management platform that only intends to save the cost & time of our clients more intuitively. It is a unified corporate travel platform enabling end-to-end convenience for the employees and building transparency and decision-making ability for the corporates.
We offer a vast range of travel inventory of Flights & Hotels supported with corporate fares alongside dynamic policy design & expense management tool integrated into the same platform. It can also accommodate any complex hierarchy with approval flow to have better control over the travel cost.
Our smart expense management module makes it easy for the employees to simply click the picture of the bill and upload it in no time and simultaneously enable corporates to have better control over their financial governance related to travel by making all the travel-related services digital.
Q. Who inspired you to to start Ziptrrip & Who is your mentor?
Ziptrrip originally started as a budget travel solution that was geared towards helping young traveler with limited budget vacation options. Once the budget was provided by the user along with the destination. Ziptrrip calculated the costs like flights, trains, cabs, hotels, food, bus fares.
While designing this our team was also noticed the corporate travel segment was very unorganized with hardly any digital solutions available. This led to our pivoting to the current vertical of the B2B Corporate travel solution.
Meet Our Mentors
Mr Suneel Mohnot
with over 35 years of corporate experience in general management with a strong emphasis on commercial functions, setting up/running a business as well as designing systems to improve efficiency. He will be instrumental in mentoring Ziptrrip on investment, organizational structure & networking.
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Mr Anil Rajanala
has over 35 years of experience with core expertise in Business development & Customer experience management He will be enabling us on scaling, process design & collaboration with partners who can act as a catalyst in cross-selling in the B2B sphere.
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Mr Mayur Pabari
is the founder of Smartsense Consulting Solutions, a Blockchain evangelist and a firm believer that decentralization and peer-to-peer governance systems can help define a new path for the progress of humanity. He has been into research & development since early 2015. He is passionate about exploring new things and grab opportunities.
Since early 2015 he has been into Blockchain from soup to nuts and building a development team of elites for the same. Mayur will be advising Ziptrrip on platform vision and various other aspect related to Ziptrrip technology.
Q. Introduce your Co-Founder/Founders and Team.
Besides me there are:
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• Bhaskara Rama Sai Busam :
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• Rahul R Kumar
with over 12 years of experience while specializing in product design and development will be heading the customer experience and engagement. He has worked on product management during the initial phase of Ziptrrip which comes very handy for designing & executing the customer experience on-ground.
We are based out of Mumbai but we also have other members in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Telangana who are focusing on business development, technology, finance and compliances. As a separate vertical we have awarded a franchise in Kerala to pilot & evaluate the feasibility of this model as a scale driver.
Q. What’s Ziptrrip’s Funding Status & What are the Future plans?
Ziptrrip has raised $35000 as seed capital for product development from a couple of private angel investors along with our technology partner & advisor Smartsense Consulting Solutions Pvt. Ltd who have been a great enabler for our product development & design.
We are currently focusing on customer on-boarding & product enhancement and will be soon looking for another fund raise for scaling the business in India and other potential markets.
ZipTrrip Website | Facebook | LinkedIn
A few words shared by Mr. Nitin, about VID at the end.
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Thank you Mr. Nitin for sharing your wonderful startup story and amazing vision. Team VID wishes you all the very best with your venture and upcoming projects.