nikunjagrawal.me
nikunjagrawal.me

Airhob

  • The idea was to build a B2B booking platform for small travel agents to book flights with frequent flyer miles intelligence that wasn't available on any B2B platform around the world.
  • Our family business ran by my father was into leisure travel & tourism and because I loved traveling so much, I thought of exploring the online travel space by helping our family business go online. It could help grow our family business and will also help me figure out what interesting opportunities are lying around to build something valuable. I re-branded our entire brick-and-mortar business to AIRHOB.
  • We struck partnerships with Sabre to power our flight inventory and terms we negotiated with them still makes us laugh in dis-belief.
  • In Jan 2016, I started building the front-end for our flight booking engine in the industry standard split-view design for domestic roundtrip bookings. It was a good challenge to imagine and create the design for showing miles intelligence around a) how many miles you'd earn on each flight, how much you need for cabin upgrade and b) importing your miles account into Airhob that allows us to show personalized miles accrual and how taking a slightly expensive flight would mean higher miles accrual, thereby allowing the traveler to buy a $50 expensive flight just to gain that extra 1000 miles. I was stoked that we could power something like this. How did Airhob B2B Miles Intelligence look like?

We had made an ADVERT (tried to make it funny) to create awareness around Frequent Flyer miles:

  • By Sep 2016 the mYwindow team had our MVP ready to onboard travel agents.
  • By Nov 2016, we started adding other revenue divisions like hotels, sightseeing activities, trains, euro rail passes and packaged tours to Airhob. We hired 4 new female developers, increasing our team size to 7 people.
  • Within just six months, we achieved the revenues from previous year (of our family business), which in-fact were stagnant since last 2-3 years due to heavy impact on the brick-and-mortar businesses with online e-commerce booming around the world. We decided to not even touch the B2C space because the other players had strong discount/cashback driven volume-over-profits strategy, brainwashing the consumers to look for discounts over quality.
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In Mar 2017, I noticed a big problem faced by travel startups that I could easily help solve and grow our revenues even more. It takes tons of money ($40k-$80k), months of time, involves too much paper work, previous years of offline revenue history and too many industry certifications to get API access to the inventory and booking capabilities from suppliers of flight, hotel, sightseeing activities or train content. There were hundreds of developers, students and young travel startups wanting easy access to Travel APIs so that they could search, book and cancel tickets within their product without involving any third-party redirects or branding. It's like how Stripe did the complex work of partnering with banks and offered a simple API to developers. We built exactly that for a smaller niche of travel startups.
  • We launched our Travel APIs in Aug 2017 with start-of-the-art RESTful APIs serving data over JSON. The API supported 40+ currencies from day one and any global product could integrate our booking-capable APIs for free across flights, hotels, sightseeing, euro passes, and trains.
  • Within two months, we had 50+ travel startups and developers using our APIs. The response was so overwhelming that we had to impose a one month trial period to make way for startups that were serious to utilize our APIs for booking purposes and not just searches (airlines don't allow this as it disturbs their look-to-book ratios).
  • In Oct 2017, we introduced a paid plan with a small upfront ($400) fee that gave them commissions on each booking, making the free plan available for startups that are just looking for booking capabilities without any commission expectations.
  • In November 2017, I started exploring another market in the travel industry - corporate business travel. All medium and large companies (over 200 employees) heavily disliked the current state of business travel products due to their old cluttered UI, controlled supplier inventory/content and zero focus on shipping new-age features. With our booking engine ready in a classic UI already, and great unique features like the frequent flyer miles, we thought we had a great opportunity to break into this market, starting with India.
  • I divided the API team and corporate travel team and defined a 2 month target to develop the missing pieces for the corporate product - trip creation, policy and approval compliance, and location based tax profile management.
  • SATTE 2018: While the dev team was now busy building their thing, we registered Airhob for the biggest B2B travel trade exhibition in New Delhi 'SATTE' where thousands of travel companies (small, medium, large) come to witness the latest happenings in the industry. It's like the India version of ITB Berlin. It was a three day event from Jan 31 - Feb 02, 2018, we bought a small booth for us, got the creatives ready and decided to take 2 more people along with me for marketing.
  • After 6 months, we added a new version v3 with loads of new features and the positive feedback pushed us to further increase the upfront fee to $800 (to maintain quality and still keep a small enough fee), and disable the free access to the API, which still was taken with a lot of positivity.

While on the New Delhi trip for SATTE, I met a few people that led me to get hold of a secret market in the corporate travel industry that I finally realized my break and exploration was over and I knew what I wanted to do next - ZENMER.

You can read more about how a meeting in Mumbai led me to stop focusing on Airhob and starting Zenmer

: Whom I really met, the full conversation, what was so special about the market, acquisition offers, confusions and finally getting our first client cheque.