Love brought this Princeton grad to India. Now she helps Indians go globe-trotting

Meilinda Huang, founder of Tripdaddy.

When American businesswoman and travel lover Meilinda Huang moved to India with her now-husband to live with his parents, she didn’t expect to get a startup out of it.

The Princeton alum with an MBA from UCLA Anderson spent a year in New Delhi. While there, she and her husband suspected that there was room for improvement in the Indian market for those who were interested in touring the world – and who wanted to purchase vacation packages, in particular. The way people were doing it – calling up travel agencies after seeing their ads and comparing several prices before picking the right one – seemed cumbersome. All-inclusive tours are supposed to save time, not waste it, right?

I’m a woman, I look Asian, but I’m from America, so for me, one of the difficulties was that [people] were kind of confused why I was here and doing something focused on India.

“We wanted to aggregate to make that easy for people to browse, to know how much is a package to Australia for 10 days […] without having to call and wait for a travel agency to get back with travel options and prices,” Meilinda tells Tech in Asia.

Inspired by China’s Tuniu and by their own conversations with fellow travelers and people working in the industry, Meilinda realized that there was still an opening in the industry for people who wanted their trips – transportation, hotels, meals, visas, etc. – mostly or completely booked for them. Visa paperwork, for example, can be a pain in the neck, and it can be a hassle trying to figure out where to get a vegetarian meal in a foreign country.

With that India audience in mind – people touring the world for the first time, families, and middle-class jet-setters – she started to think about building a website that would put all the pieces of the jigsaw together.

That was in December 2014. In February last year, Meilinda took her idea to India’s 2015 Travel and Tourism Fair (TTF) in New Delhi as one of the 275 exhibitors from 19 states and won the Most Innovative Product Award.

By March, construction on the site was underway, The updated product, mobile-friendly Tripdaddy.co launched in November.

Ready for takeoff

Meilinda is now experiencing the void between forming an idea and putting up an actual product. In the second month since its launch, she’s still trying to scale the site. It’s a two-step process. First, agencies have to sign on. Second, people have to use the service. In the spirit of getting the word out there, the process is free for both parties. For now, at least.

An increasing number of agencies have signed up. “Once we hit a threshold, we would basically have an advertising model, where we would advertise additional services online, like featured packages from travel agencies, for an extra fee,” she explains.

Also in the works is a pay-per-click model, inspired by Kayak, in which more specific details are provided if the customer clicks through to see more about a package. In that case, the agency in question would be charged a fee.

Asian-American in India