“Every holiday you take will have an element of road trip involved. If you holiday in Goa, you invariably would take a taxi or a self-drive on hire to explore the countryside better, unless you want to spend all your time in the airport!”. This is one of the aspects the co-founders had well researched about before venturing out to form a travel companion firm exclusively for road trips. Shaping their thoughts to make it a reality, a team of two passionate travel enthusiasts destined to meet crossed paths and conceptualized building a community for road travel. They named it ScoutMyTrip. A platform that helps fellow road travellers travel better and more informed along the roads in the country.The dedicated team assists the user in planning their time better and providing all the necessary information related to the trip. Before the trip commences, a traveller can plan and explore without uncertainties generally associated with road travel.

While the greatest issue faced by the Indian traveller today is lack of free availability of information on places to visit that leads them to trawl the internet, read blogs, ScoutMyTrip is a Do-It-Yourself engine that just asks the users about the place they are travelling to. It then takes five steps during which the user chooses routes based on conditions, places to stay from the biggest aggregators in the online space at present, scout for restaurants, toilets and petrol

stations along the highway that don’t require to take detours. The platform further offers information on other places of interests along the highway that the user chooses to visit. Throwing light on the same, Deepak Ananth, speaks, “Once you go through these steps, you can generate an itinerary that has all the facets of the road trip clearly demarcated and which can be carried on the mobile during the trip for easy access. You can even talk to experts or ‘scouts’ on the platform to get the details about what else you can do or what you should avoid while travelling to a region.”

Facilitating numerous road trips across India for various clients, ScoutMyTrip in the last 6 months has opened their product to users to plan their trips and over 2000 trips have been planned online

Over the last one year over 2000 trips have been planned on the platform. There is a lot of interactions that have taken place on the platform which have helped travellers to no end. "Our product is still a work in progress, feedback from the travellers have been instrumental in making improvements to the platform. We have just launched the same on the platform this month. Similarly, a lot of users have asked for a mobile based system, which we are working on and will launch the same very soon!Says Vineet Rajan the Co Founder of ScoutMyTrip.

Organizing Road Trips at its Best
Facilitating numerous road trips across India for various clients, ScoutMyTrip in the last 6 months has opened their product to users to plan their trips and over 2000 trips have been planned online!“Some of our users have even taken us along, albeit virtually on their

travels. I remember a case where the user planned a trip from Kanyakumari to Kashmir on ScoutMyTrip. He would send us messages daily telling us about how he did on the day and how the platform helped him plan better. He was particularly thankful that the community was helpful in getting him places to that were suitable for a family to stay and explore. There are plenty of stories like this, they make it all worth the while!” mentions Neeraj Sinha the CTO of ScoutMyTrip.

Currently, hotel booking, self-drive car rentals, outstation taxis are being offered on the platform. The company is also bringing in a commerce platform that will give options to the traveller to buy packages for a type of holidays they choose. “We are also looking at CARE packages which are insurance and road side assistance services for our users so that their travel becomes even more hassle free,” he adds.

Taking pride of a rewarding journey over a year, team ScoutMyTrip has grown from a 2-member team to 8 members now and have been funded and further accelerated by Z Nation Labs, a Silicon Valley based incubator in April 2017. The company has partnership with OYO rooms to deliver affordable hotel rates to travellers and ONN bikes to provide two wheelers for the road tripper. ScoutMyTrip also has Booking.com and others as partners for hotel rooms and is in active talks with a few other market leaders in the same space.

ScoutMyTrip has launched features that are vital to road trip planning like forums, experience packages and customised tours to further help the traveller. They are further looking at expanding to regions outside India. “We are travellers ourselves and would we believe our experience will add the extra mile in making the road trip for the user even more fruitful,” concludes Deepak on a positive note.