HolidayIQ to raise $15mn series B capital from Makemytrip

BANGALORE – HolidayIQ, India’s travel community and holidays recommendation engine, will raise it’s next round of capital from Makemytrip, India’s leading online travel company. The funds will mainly be used to further strengthen its capabilities on content, mobile and product. HolidayIQ had raised series A before from Tiger Global and Accel Partners. The focus at HolidayIQ is to become the ‘authentic voice of Indian travellers’, by encouraging all Indian travellers to share reviews and express opinion on all their travel. Currently, HolidayIQ has over a million holiday reviews from Indian travellers, which is expected to increase multi-fold over the next two years.
 

Hari Nair, Founder and CEO of HolidayIQ said, “Disruption is a way of life at HolidayIQ and today we power more than 11 million travellers every month in making smarter travel decisions based on the reviews and insights from other Indian travellers. Mobile is creating new unprecedented opportunities for growth and innovation. This capital gives us additional resources to expand quickly and strategically and accelerate pace of product innovation. We look forward to working closely with Makemytrip in getting a much larger number of Indian travellers to participate in the creation of Indian traveller opinion.“
 

Speaking on the investment, Deep Kalra, Founder and Group CEO, MakeMyTrip.com, said, “HolidayIQ operates in a very exciting space in the Indian online travel market. Their pace and appetite for innovation matches ours, and we see great synergy in our focus on hotels and mobile. The opportunity to drive scale jointly is fairly significant.“
 

Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and CEO-India, MakeMyTrip.com, shared, “This tie-up will power our hotel-growth strategy, and also provide immense value to Indian travellers in the form of user generated and curated trip-planning content. We also expect to rapidly scale our reviews and recommendation engine as an outcome of this investment.“
 

Consumer behavior and preferences are rapidly evolving in the travel sector and HolidayIQ has been clued in to the pulse of this evolution, releasing many interesting offerings especially in the mobile space such offline guides for 1300 Indian destinations, India’s first mobile only holidays marketplace, reviews for journey options, etc. HolidayIQ’s mobile app has consistently witnessed a high customer traction, with a very high user rating of 4.3 on 5 on the Google Play store.
 

HolidayIQ.com is a premier holiday information portal powered by India’s first and biggest travel community; enabling travellers to first discover numerous vacation choices, then plan holiday trips in full detail and finally, share holiday experiences with millions of other travellers.