The Great Expedist — All-inclusive weekend getaways on a student budget

The Great Expedist was co-founded by Jindal Global Law School students Shine Varghese and Anurag Bansal in the early days of February 2017 to provide posh, all-inclusive trips to college students. Here is their Startup Story.

About Our Startup

We started up The Great Expedist (TGE) due to a lack of options for high-quality but affordable travel services to provide relaxing weekend getaways for JGU students.

Our aim as the founders of TGE was to curate diverse experiences for our customers, including adventure sports, team building activities, historical learning and an extremely comfortable stay to deliver the travel experience JGU students want.

Our weekend package vacations cost only Rs. 5500–6000, and they include elegant and lavish amenities including a four-star resort or a five-star hotel.

Because the trips are all-inclusive, they are also worry-free for our customers. We have got everything covered including toiletries, personalized luggage tags, welcome cards at the hotel, water bottles during transit and well laid out meals throughout the trip.

Show me the money!

Every startup focuses on earning, but the more innovative the start-up’s profit structure, the more profitable it will be. TGE’s business case is a social entrepreneurship model that emphasizes the importance of travel for student mental health and wellbeing.

Since our aim is to keep the trip affordable, we need to be extremely cautious about pricing our trips. TGE expects to attain the maximum profitability by developing multiple sources of income during the trip. The primary source is the margin per consumer we get and the secondary sources are commissions from our partner businesses like souvenir stores, clubs, and restaurants.

One of the main reasons we manage profits by keeping the price so affordable is economies of scale. Our trips are curated for a minimum group size of 30. We operate as a student-run startup and are able to stay lean. We don’t hire full-time employees and instead use professionals to deliver services on contracts based on pro-rata consideration. The huge savings from this model helps us generate lower net costs and increased net profits.

How do we sell?

Selling our packages is key, and how we do this defines our success. We market our products at the precise moments when college students are tired and bored of their campus life but at the same time don’t have any pressing obligations like exams and submissions. For example, O.P. Jindal Global University students are most likely to join us in first week of the second month of the semester.

The sales channel involves students from various colleges who work for us as part-time agents. Incentives for them range from free trips and commissions to an annual dinner and party with the founders, depending on the sales they are bringing in.

Branding & Marketing

We use e-mail as our primary marketing channel. All the students in our consumer market segment are on and actively use e-mail. We develop polished, professional e-mails with help of the service provider MailChimp.

We thoroughly research the market trends and consumer psychology before sending our promotional e-mails. We usually insights from many sources, ranging from research papers available on JSTOR to infographics available on Pinterest.

Once our e-mail is designed, we place call to action buttons within the e-mail, strategically positioning them by conducting A/B testing provided within MailChimp. These call to action buttons lead the customers to a landing page, which we try to make as interactive as possible. For our landing page, we use a service called Typeform that makes data-gathering a fun, user-friendly experience.

Tip: Don’t kill the momentum of your call to action button with a dull landing page!

One way to keep your audience engaged once they are on the landing page is to appreciate their effort. We do this in two ways:

1. Make potential customers feel appreciated and included with statements like, “Thanks a ton for your interest. We are excited to have you as a prospective member of our upcoming trip.”
2. Keep the audience on track by incentivizing fast form completion: “Just few more seats in early bird left, submit soon!” or “ Prices have gone up by 23% since yesterday and expected to increase within the next hour.” These psychological triggers will motivate your customer to move quickly through the sign-up process.

For taking payments, we use both offline and online portals. We didn’t want to invest in huge online transaction portals, so online payments are made using a third party easy to setup application, InstaMojo. We also accept IMPS transfers.

Beating the bottleneck!

One of the main problems we encountered, which slowed down our sales, was parental permissions. Hence, we needed to prove to every parent that our trips are the safest and most professional on the market. To do this, we hired a road safety consultant who not only assisted us with routes but gave a professional verification of the drivers and vehicles involved in the trip. Second, we equipped the buses with armed ex-Army personnel, who would serve as our Personal Safety Advisors. Finally, we created a base camp in Delhi which was updated about our whereabouts on an hourly basis. In case the group traveling was unreachable at any point on the trip, parents could directly contact the base camp.

We successfully communicated the above precautions with various e-mail campaigns — and were successful in convincing even the strictest of IAS and IPS officers to send their wards with us.

Social Angle Helps!

TGE understands the problems of stress, loneliness, anxiety and other mental health issues today’s college students face. We strongly believe that one of the best solutions to such problems is travelling and exploring new places. We hence tackle these problems using the love for travel. Our trips thus have a social tag of #travelforhappiness attached. We also use this to the fullest potential in vendor negotiations! We work really hard to make our vendors come on board with us to understand how essential it is to tackle these problems to make a wonderful future. Many of our vendors finally realize this great social responsibility we have and work for absolutely minimum profits, as way of expressing their support to us. This acts as a major factor in cutting down costs and delivering affordable prices to students.

Epilogue

The first “wow” moment for TGE was when we hit a revenue of INR 5,95,500 within three days of our launch! This moment was something which validated our efforts. That day we decided since we sold it well, we had to deliver it well too. This effort was rewarded with a second “wow” moment when more than 50 customers thanked us for the awesome experience they had.

Now TGE has four touring circuits and has delivered services to students from universities, including O.P. Jindal Global University, Amity University, VIPS and CSVTU. Now, as we celebrate our first anniversary, we have more than INR 2 million in revenue.

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