Tripping for a story together, going Byond Travel

Traveling to a favoured destination? Sounds good! Traveling with someone who also likes that destination and everything it offers, as much? Sounds great! Adding a new dimension to travel as an experience many times over, and each time wrapping a new vibe around it, is what ‘Byond Travel’ means.

The idea blossomed two years ago, when Vikram Ahuja was struck with the throught of putting together a novel notion of experiential travel around the world.

Retracing his steps to the inception of Byond Travel, he says, “The new-age traveler is more interested in doing things rather than seeing things — like interacting with local communities, arts, culture and music. While working on ideas that focus on experiential travel, we found a gap in the community space.” He continued, “We realised that while people want experiential travel — wherein they also prefer traveling with other like-minded people for necessity or the comfort of a group — the market is relatively small, yet growing.”

The uniqueness of the company is not just in offering experiential travel, but rather specifically curated holidays, which brings people with common interests and tastes to collectively savour memories. Today, Byond Travel covers 50 countries, while retaining the aspect of building local interactions, experiences and conversations in every destination.

Besides the commerce aspect, the push towards building communities for travel, has given rise to a periodic event, ‘Lime Diaries’, which helps travelers rediscover storytelling through travel stories and anecdotes, which draws many interested participants.

“We are not a travel company or tour operator, but a ‘community that travels’. We don’t sell packages, but the notion of traveling with like-minded people, for whom we have group departures,” Ahuja, who is also the CEO, says, adding that last year, 27 fixed departures and multiple private trips took place, while this year, 65 departures are expected.

The company also has a strategic partnership with Eastbound Tours and Travel, which assists in back-end and logistics. In order to curate trips, Byond Travel has written content wherein it promotes destinations for specific audiences, apart from working with influencers. It works with tourism boards of around 10 countries, and is also active on social media, where it tells patrons about its upcoming trips, and what niche trips they are!

“Currently, we have nine communities namely, Women Only, Yoga, Self-Drive, Mixed Groups, Adventure, Music, Dance, Senior Citizens, and Photography. We are building Mom and Kids, LGBT, Spiritual, and so on, for the future,” Ahuja says.

A ‘no app-web only’ approach has gotten Byond Travel heading towards creating virtual reality products, wherein it’s working with tourism boards, and has an own production studio to create immersive content for the benefit of travelers. The bootstrapped company may look at a wider global presence this year.