This Indian startup converts your smartphone into a tour guide

Imagine you’re on a holiday trip to Paris, visiting the Louvre for the first time. Your guide book tells you it’s one of the top 10 things to do while in Paris. However, on reaching the Louvre, you have absolutely no idea what to do next. You might follow the crowd cluelessly or rely on the judgment of a tour guide –  being constantly herded around as part of a big group, and sticking to someone else’s schedule. To address these universal travel woes, Mumbai-based startup Guiddoo created an app for travellers that acts as a smart alternative to expensive tour guides.

The app offers audiovisual tour guides and walking tours of historical, cultural, and art destinations. It acts like a personal tour guide and offers key insights, history and trivia, timelines and places of interest, and other essential tourist information. It even enables users to book tours and buy tickets to several major tourist destinations around the world.

“Guiddoo builds in-destination experiences. Usually travel has five phases – inspiration, research, booking, in-destination, and sharing. We build products that customers need the most at the in-destination phase, which includes audiovisual tour guides, hotels, restaurants, tours, and activities,” says Nidhi Varma, CEO and co-founder.

The idea struck Varma when she was on a trip to Paris with her husband Vineet Budki (who is the other co-founder of Guiddoo). Her dream of reaching the summit of the Eiffel Tower remained unfulfilled due to labor strikes and congestions; their whole trip was chaos. It was during this chaotic trip that she came up with the idea of creating Guiddoo as a way to make travel more convenient and memorable.

The guide to Guiddoo

Launched in November 2013, the company has content across 25 countries at 75 locations. How does it gather all that information?

“We have a network of tour guides present at these locations who do this as part of their daily jobs. They, along with our content writers, build audiovisual content around the gathered information. This content is further filtered and checked in-house and made available in audio format through professional artists, as well as converted in other languages,” Varma says.

“We generate revenue through sales of audio guides to customers at US$1.99 and US$4.99, as well as commissions from tours, activities, and ticket sales on our platform. We also have a subscription model where we charge companies for our content, which include online travel agencies like MakeMyTrip, tourism boards like Mekong Tourism, and events,” she tells Tech in Asia.

Since its inception, the company has generated approximately INR15,00,000 (US$23,400) of revenue from B2C and B2B players. Guiddoo has been bootstrapped since December 2014, but it recently raised funding from a group of angel investors and is in the process of raising a bigger round. The investors backing Guiddoo include Pawan Borle of SVP Fly Dubai, Abrar Ahmad, Partner TravelCapitalist Ventures, Nirmal Singh of Ducab, Vishal Shah, founder of AcFin Consulting, and Sanjay Shah and Ushik Gala, who are chartered accountants by profession but are also serial angel investors.

The road ahead

Guiddoo’s expansion plan includes building content for the top 25 inbound destinations globally. It’s also planning to build a solution for India specifically, which will be available in multiple Indian languages.

The road ahead in the in-destination space may be bumpy for Guiddoo, as many competitors are also in the race. Backed by 500 Startups, Tushky is one of the major competitors of Guiddoo. This Mumbai-based startup offers a marketplace for travellers to enjoy local leisure activities.

Mumbai-based AudioCompass is another major rival. It offers an app called the AudioCompass Guide that provides audio guided tours of major tourist destinations across India. Founded in 2011, the company raised US$400,000 in seed funding last year.