HappyEasyGo - This 3 Year Old Startup is Fast Capturing the Indian Online Travel Booking Segment

Tourism and Travel never fail to fascinate people, and it never goes outdated. In 2018, Indian travelers took approximately 2 billion domestic and international trips, and spent over $94 billion on transportation, accommodation and consumption during travel. The travel and tourism sector in India is growing fast and another trend we see is the increasing share of online travel bookings. As per reports, the share of online travel booking was 25% in 2018, and is expected to increase to 35% till 2021, with increase in internet penetration. Keeping up with this trend, many Online Travel Agencies have come up, of which Make My Trip, Yatra, Cleartrip etc are some well know names, but there are also some other players that are quietly but fast gaining a higher position for itself in the online travel booking segment. One such company that is now posing threat to the market leaders in the OTA segment is  'HappyEasyGo'. Founded in May 2017, this company has achieved quite a lot just within three years of its inception. Let's have a look at HappyEasyGo's journey so far.

Company Highlights

About HappyEasyGo
HappyEasyGo - Founders & Team
HappyEasyGo - Growth & Revenue
HappyEasyGo - Funding & Investors
HappyEasyGo - Business Model & Revenue Model
HappyEasyGo - Competitors
HappyEasyGo - Future Plans

About HappyEasyGo

Gurugram based HappyEasyGo offers flight and  hotel booking services at very modest rates. Founded by Boris Zha, HappyEasyGo initially started only with booking tickets for domestic and international flights, and later it incorporated hotel booking facilities across India. It provides convenient booking solutions for customers in its mobile application and through their website, with easy cancellation and rescheduling options, which helps the customers to save more in their travel packages.

Also Read: A List of Top Popular and Innovative Travel Startups of India

HappyEasyGo - Founders & Team

Boris Zha founded HappyEasyGo in 2017, with the vision to provide convenient ways of reservation for business and leisure travelers at affordable prices. Boris who is from Singapore also founded Lvbanx.com in 2012, which is now one of the top top B2B OTAs in China. Prior to venturing into the online travel segment, Boris made a mark in the education sector too. Boris Joined Neworld Education Group in 2006, as a founding member of  Sakura International Japanese.  Boris also served as the CIO of Neworld Education Group.

Vivek Prabhakar  is the co-founder of HappyEasyGo . An alumni of Jawahar Lal Nehru University (Chinese Language and South East Asia Studies) and Harvard Business School, Vivek founded VINI Group prior to joining HappyEasyGo as the cofounder.

The three main directors of HappyEasyGo are Rajesh Kumar Dathik, Zhou Lei, and YanqiuZha. As per LinkedIn, HappyEasyGo has around 500-1000 employees.

HappyEasyGo - Growth & Revenue

Within a short span, HappyEasyGo has become the leading online travel platform in India, and has over 10 million user base. As reported in 2019, HappyEasyGo was doing around 25,000 air ticket transactions daily, while it did a little over 1000 hotel bookings as day, as revealed by the HappyEasyGo CEO Boris Zha. HappyEasyGo’s annual revenue is estimated to be around $3 M per year (as per Owler), and has an authorized capital of INR 15 Cr. As revealed by Boris, till April 2019, 80% of HappyEasyGo's air ticketing volume comes from individual consumers, while only 20% came from corporations and business accounts.

Also Read: Success Story of RedBus - a Startup that is Simplifying Bus Travel

HappyEasyGo - Funding & Investors

HappyEasyGo has raised total funding worth INR 3.5  billion till date. Here are the funding details of HappyEasyGo.

HappyEasyGo - Business Model & Revenue Model

OTAs like HappyEasyGo earns revenue from various sources like-

• Commission - Here the company earns commission when customers purchase air tickets or book hotels through their platform. In case of hotel booking, merchant model is also followed. In the merchant model, OTAs like HappyEasyGo books hotel rooms in bulk at discounted price, and sells the same to the customers at market price and thus earns profit.
• Advertising Revenue - OTAs also lets Hotels advertise on their platform and earns money from it.
• Earnings from Tie-ups - OTAs also ties up with banks and financial institutes to provide various facilities like travel insurance, for various offers on travel bookings etc, and earns commission when consumers buy insurance or avail services from banks or financial services through their platform. For example, HappyEasyGo tied up with MobiKwik, whereby customers can avail offers on making payment through MobiKwik, and also HappyEasyGo earns commission on the same.

HappyEasyGo - Competitors

The major competitors of HappyEasyGo are MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Cleartrip, Ixigo and Paytm. Though there are a lot of competitors in the travel industry, HappyEasyGo with its great performance is fast and steadily rising above the competition. As reported in 2018, i.e just within one year of its inception, HappyEasyGo went ahead of Paytm (Paytm started its travel business in 2014). In 2018, HappyEasyGo was doing around 1,80,000 to 2,00,000 flight ticket booking a month, which is more than that of Paytm which then was doing 100,000 to 120,000 flight ticket bookings a month. While, during the same period, Yatra and Cleartrip were processing between 2,30,000 - 3,00,000 flight tickets every year.

Also Read: How Travel Startups are Planning to Recover after the Corona Virus Outbreak

HappyEasyGo - Future Plans

HappyEasyGo intends to extend the hotel booking allocations across the country and to build up its air ticketing services with increased market shares. With the motto of sustaining the lowest price, the company ascribes with popular brands to expand its services. Amidst the current Corona Virus Crisis, HappyEasyGo is not only letting its customer reschedule their travel dates without paying any rescheduling fee, but has also tied up with healthcare brands like 1mg, Medlife, Himalaya etc, whereby the company will provide discount coupons of these brands to its customers.

As said by HappyEasyGo founder Boris Zha, the company is looking forward to closing 3000 hotel bookings a day and aims to become the best online travel aggregator in India.

"India is the third-largest air travelling country in the world and we are confident to utilize the fresh funds towards gaining a commanding position in the cluttered online travel market in India”, added Boris after HappyEasyGo's latest round of funding raised in December 2019.