Leveraging WhatsApp, this travel business made Rs. 2.5 Cr. monthly during the pandemic

Meet WTFares

WTFares was launched in 2015 as a booking engine. Back when the flight ticket size was around Rs. 8000, WTFares was doing great with over 50 odd transactions in just a day.

Soon, in an effort to rethink their strategies, Varun and his team started free flight cancellation on all domestic flights. Being the first-movers in the industry, this business model took off to a great start giving them notable media coverages, even a monopoly in the market to set the terms.

In just a few months, with other players replicating this model, it no longer remained a USP for WTFares. When they started seeing a drop-out of users, in order to get back on the map – the team decided to plan exclusive holidays for their users.

They started focusing on lesser-known destinations around the world, that were not frequently visited. Seychelles was one such destination that was super luxurious, affordable and even had direct flights to. The team quickly started building holiday plans for Seychelles and a few South-East Asian countries. By 2018, WTFares was doing over 1000 arrivals into Seychelles every year. They became the sole contributors for 15% of Indian arrivals into Seychelles, which won them an award from the tourism board of Seychelles.

WTFares went on to make Rs. 2.5 Crores a month and continued to do sizeable business, with an increase of 35-40% in annual revenues.

Their Goals

With a forte in crafting some of the best holiday experiences around the world, Varun and his team were keen to scale up and build onto this with added value for their users. In addition to revamping their website and building one of the fastest holiday planning websites, they decided to bank on WhatsApp to push sales.

Their goals were to:

• • Reach customers on the most used messaging app & improve the current response time which was 30-40 hours via email
• • Have multiple teammates manage at least 5-6 customer chats and have a record of all the conversations in one place‍

Their Solution

In order to stay in the game and keep going strong, Varun solely believes that the business needs to pivot and adapt to the ever-changing needs of the travel industry. For a product like theirs, where manual advice and constant customer engagement is a must, email simply did not make the cut.

Before the launch of interakt, WTFares who were one of the early players to trust in the capabilities of WhatsApp as a channel for business, used non-official solutions that were eventually turning out to be very costly and unreliable.

After going through a smooth onboarding with interakt, Varun and his team were happy to be told exactly where the product is headed. Among the many features of interakt, Automated WhatsApp Notifications have truly worked wonders for WTFares in driving interested queries instantly.

While pricing was reasonable, Varun says that another reason to opt for interakt was that the team was extremely responsive and open to suggestions for building better user experiences.