In 2007, when Abhishek (my husband and co-founder, Thrillophilia) and I moved to Bangalore, we were a huge gang of friends and we used to travel a lot around Bangalore, whether it be short trips, treks or other adventure activities like water sports. It is then that we realised that the market for such activities is disorganised—it was difficult to discover what options were available and further the offerings were not standardised. There was a lot of demand, but no dominant player in the space. It was then that the idea for a business opportunity crossed our minds and by 2009 we had launched Thrillophilia.

I would say that the main reason we are seeing more and more women taking up our offerings is due to a change related to the society. Women have become independent and taken up greater roles in their lives. Hence, they tend to take up more challenges and pushing oneself in the physical front is one way to do that. So the demand for adventure sports like treks, rafting and bungee jumping has gone up among women. Another main reason why the demand for adventure activities has increased both among men and women is that their careers are often very demanding and they look at these activities to relax and unwind.

The increasing participation of women reflects in the figures. We have seen that when it comes to mild adventure activities like kayaking tours, short treks (1-3 days), water sports and so on, women showcase huge participation and we have around 41 per cent women travellers participating in these kind of activities. When it comes to international backpacking tours, women participation is close to 32 per cent. We have seen women travellers travelling to Norway, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and even South America. The Himalayan treks also show good participation from women with 24 per cent women travellers. The most popular treks among women are the MarkhaValley trek and the Valley of Flowers.

Safety is a major concern for women in India. Adventure is mostly in the outdoors and interest of women in such offbeat outdoor tours has been increasing.

Suggesting options to solo women travellers becomes challenging at times. We are launching a new category—“Women Only Departures” after receiving a lot of enquiries on the same. These are tours operated for groups of women travellers by expert operators across the globe. Outdoor physical activity is not a challenge as women have always been mentally strong and, nowadays, with increasing focus on fitness, women are turning out to be physically stronger than ever.

To understand what we do, it is important to remember that Thrillophilia is not an operator, rather we are a technology company in the business of aggregating and curating various trips and activities from the best suppliers. There were several operators in the market that offered these activities, but had a couple of issues. First, there was no single platform where interested travellers could go and discover the various options available and pick what suited them. Second, there was the matter of trust; people want to know whether their money is safe and if they have someone to address their problems in case they face any. We have tried to address these needs. Our model is similar to redBus.in, we do not operate our own buses, but provide our customers a platform to choose from the various options available.

Any investment company looks at a few things before funding—the size of the market opportunity, the scale of the business model, competition landscape and the team. The market is fairly promising; the consumer trend is shifting towards doing activities while on a holiday. Thrillophilia has grown 13 times in the last seven months on back of the activities booked on the platform. The website traffic has grown five times in the last 12 months. There is no clear market leader in this space as of now, which makes the opportunity bigger. We certainly have a passionate team and all of us are all excited at the opportunity.

We have seen a lot of demand, so educating the customer has not been a problem, but the supply side is a challenge. There are a lot of operators across India and across the world, which makes the supply side very disorganised. There are several small players and some of them just offer a single tour. Some might be based out of such remote locations that they do not even have phone or email access. We are still working on this and aim to provide the best services to our customers. For an entrepreneur, if you have the right understanding of your business, the right plan and a good team to start with, success will not elude you.

olmdesk@outlookindia.com