Travel Startups Incubator is pleased to announce our first investment in India with GoHero.ai. A standout among the growing number of Mobile Travel Chat (MTC) startups, smart personal travel concierge.
GoHero uses a combination of artificial and human intelligence to help travelers easily access a wide range of travel info and manage their bookings via text chat. The app is designed to make planning, booking, and managing travel easier than ever. GoHero provides a free, fun, user-friendly interface that saves travelers time and money. It also creates a traveler profile that allows it to provide recommendations and even price alerts for future trips.
The GoHero team includes co-founder and CEO Snehal Dhruve and co-founder and CFO Bineet Desai in Mumbai. GoHero was revamped to focus solely on the travel industry within weeks of its launch.
“After evaluating the business and considering various data points related to data availability, API access, profitability, turnover, and market size,” Desai notes, “we came to the conclusion that it was best to focus on a mature segment like travel, given the pain points an ordinary traveler faces.”
According to Dhruve, GoHero can help an Indian traveler “plan a holiday; buy trip essentials; order food; book a flight, cab, rail, or bus ticket…all through chat on an app.”
Noting that he and Desai are “passionate travelers,” Dhruve says their goal for GoHero is to help other Indian travelers get where they want to go without all the hassles most currently face. Just entering information about a planned trip on numerous travel websites in order to search for the best fares wastes considerable time, he points out, adding that even after all that effort, no personalization is provided on such sites.
“The travel customer experience is broken,” he states. “We are innovating in the space with a simple solution that keeps it personal and delightful for the consumer so they can accomplish complex tasks through a natural dialogue.”
Through its free, chat-based app, GoHero quickly and easily finds the best deals and books a selected itinerary for the user. In addition to comparing quotes from more than 1,000 travel websites for airfare, accommodations, and activities, the app also provides value-added services while a traveler is on the road that might include anything from booking a cab to providing information on regional cuisine or local restaurants. In short, GoHero.ai is an end-to-end personal travel manager designed to meet all of a traveler’s needs in a manner that is as efficient and personalized as possible.
According to Matt Zito, Managing Partner at Travel Startups Incubator, “GoHero has got off to a fast start booking over $40,000 in gross bookings and 6,000 registered travelers including a recent pilot test deal to provide employees of a large corporation in India with business travel services. Mobile Travel Chat or Travel Concierge is the next big thing to enter the travel industry.”
Mobile Travel Chat providers can provide more personalization and customization to travelers in real-time and can be “always on,” so there is an opportunity if executed properly to sell into the traveler’s entire trip cycle. This opportunity is the holly grail of the travel industry.
Lola, another MTC startup lead by ex. Kayak founders and a VC backed startup is leading the way in Mobile Travel Chat in the USA. GoHero.ai has a head start in India as one of the first MTC’s. Each major country in the world is going to have a few winners in this new emerging space.