JoGuru: India Based Feature Rich Social Travel Startup

13 September, 2012 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Social media based travel startups are mushrooming nowadays. In the last 2 years, there are at least a dozen of social travel startups that have come up. Few notable names are Trippy, Gogobot, Wanderfly, TripBirds, EverPlaces, Gtrot, Tripl. Latest to this list is – JoGuru, India based social travel startup founded by Praveen Kumar (IIM L), Saket Newaskar (MDI, Gurgaon), Karthik Ramachandra (IIM I). JoGuru was launched early this year as an invitation-only product, and then later opened up for everyone.

JoGuru is a feature rich site, in this article we will highlight the major / notable features of the site.

The Home page (JoGuru calls this page as “Trawall” : Travel + Wall) is designed like Facebook’s wall. Users will be able to post an update (trip information), other users can like / dislike / comment on the update. May be JoGuru want to reconsider the “dislike” option. There is a specific reason on why Facebook still hasn’t placed a dislike button (though many users are craving for it).

Users will be able to search for a place or hangout by categories – Sightseeing, adventure, romantic, nightlife, spiritual (there are sub-categories in each).

Interesting feature in the home page are the sections on the left and right most side.

On the left side of home page – Users will be able to create a new trip, write reports for their trips (like a blog), ask questions to an expert and create addas. Note: Adda means “place”. “Ask an expert” feature is similar to the business that mygola is into. Users of JoGuru will benefit from this feature only if JoGuru has a huge network of travel experts and more importantly they should contribute.

On the right side of home page – Users will see the number of past trips, trip reports, addas created, cities visited. Also, users will see their upcoming trips.

Every Adda (place) has a separate page in JoGuru. Users can rate an adda by accomodation, getting to and going around, climate, overall recommendation for the Adda. Also, users can mark as adda as “I have been here” or add an adda to wishlist. These features are pretty standard nowadays.

In an Adda page, users will see description, images and trip reports (written by other users) about the adda. This feature is nice, makes a user life easy to goto a particular adda page (say Hongkong) and read few trip reports by users to get a feel of that place.

Below is the profile page of a JoGuru user. A grand dashboard summary of all trips by the user is shown in the top right of the page.

Overall - JoGuru is really a feature rich and strong social travel platform for travelers to plan their trips. But, this platform will be effective ONLY if the users of JoGuru are contributing to it. The challenge that many of similar social travel startups facing is – making the users contribute. What will make the user contribute and why will they contribute – these two are the primary questions that needs to be addressed by a social travel company. At this point in time, its unclear to us how JoGuru is planning to generate revenue. There are multiple ways to generate money in a social travel platform, it will be interesting to wait and see the revenue generation ways JoGuru is going to adopt.

Author: Karthick Prabu

One Response to JoGuru: India Based Feature Rich Social Travel Startup

Sam says:

13 September, 2012 at 11:09 pm

It’s neat to see all of these new travel options popping up everywhere! Definitely changing the way people book and travel. I wasn’t aware of JoGuru – maybe I’ll check it out. Although I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up the old-fashioned personal service mode. I’ve booked a couple of trips in the past with Travcoa.com – find the tour you want online and then get on the horn to book it with a real person. I like that – it kind of reaffirms that my order is actually going someplace! And that right there is the major cultural difference between the generations!

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