If there was a genre such as business fantasy, Nishant and Rikant Pitti’s journey of building Easy Trip Planners would be a bestseller. Think about it. How often does a lark of an idea between two teenage brothers become a business that closed its latest financial year with Rs620 crore in sales? In 2004, the Pitti brothers were on a summer holiday from school and college when they first dabbled in booking airline tickets online for their friends and family—for fun. Those heady summer wins finally led the brothers to start a travel company out of their home four years later, in 2008. Today, Easy Trip Planners claims to be India’s No. 5 travel agency with a network of 35,000 travel agents. Yet, the duo is far from done. Still in their mid-20s, their next destination is— sales upwards of Rs1,400 crore by March 2014.

What makes us the most proud is that around 70 per cent of our customers have booked tickets with us at least three times. On the loyalty count, I think we beat all other travel portals." - Rikant Pitti 

Nishant Pitti: It all started during the summer break of my first year in college in June 2004. Our father used to travel a lot for his coal supply business. So, instead of going to travel agents, we started booking his tickets directly from the airlines’ website. It would save him Rs300 to Rs500 per ticket. Proudly, he spread the word amongst our relatives and all his business associates.

Rikant Pitti: Soon, our relatives began to call us to buy their tickets too. I was in school then—Class 11—but couldn’t keep myself away from the excitement. In no time, we were booking 10-15 tickets every day. My school friends also started asking us to book their tickets. That’s when we stopped to think—we couldn’t just continue to do this for free. We began to charge `200 per ticket from our friends. However, we continued to book for free for our extended family. On an average, we would make Rs600 daily. That was a lot of money for us then. We got so involved in our “business” of sorts that the two of us made a pact—we ensured one of us was always at home in case booking requests came up.

NP: As our volumes picked up, an airline noticed that our IP address was making these many bookings. They offered to make us their travel partners. We were thrilled. Generally, airlines give a five per cent incentive to the agent on selling one ticket. We persuaded them to give us six per cent. However, there was a catch. We had to deposit Rs25 lakh with them and sell tickets worth that amount in two months. 

RP: In our naive enthusiasm, we agreed and persuaded our father to help us with the money. But, we could not even sell tickets worth Rs2 lakh in the first two weeks. The Rs25 lakh target seemed far-fetched. We were stuck. We turned to our father for help again. He had good contacts in Srinagar and Guwahati. Through him, we managed to get two agents in each city who agreed to sell tickets for us using our agent’s ID. Within five days, they sold tickets worth Rs10 lakh. We sold the remaining Rs13 lakh in over a month.

 NP: When college resumed, we completely stopped this makeshift business. But, entrepreneurship never left our minds. The keeda bit us again at the end of 2005. This time we wanted to focus only on the B2B segment. We talked to a few airlines and became their travel agents. The cost of partnering with each airline generally costs Rs20-25 lakh. That is a lot of money. And, small travel agents couldn’t afford to have accounts with multiple airlines. So we thought we would book tickets for such travel agents and offer them a commission for each ticket sold. They could deposit the ticket amount later in our bank. That way, they need not make an investment with any of the airlines. This is how Duke Travels, our travel agency, started from one room in our house.

RP: Our big problem was that agents did not take us seriously because Nishant was 19, and I was 17. They were hesitant about signing up with two kids. So, we focussed on expanding our reach in Srinagar and Guhawati since we already knew several agents there. In smaller centres like these, references of our existing travel agents worked very well. Within six months, by July 2006, we had 80 travel agents working for us in Srinagar and Guwahati.

NP: To increase our network, we would use Justdial to get contact numbers of travel agents in an area and cold call them to become our travel partners. What we also started doing was persuading phone booth owners, cyber cafe owners—basically any place with more footfall—to become our travel partners. By the end of 2007, we had 400 travel agents across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gujarat and Kolkata. We were processing around 30-40 tickets daily.

For the Pitti brothers, a big challenge turned out to be agents who were unable to take entrepreneurs aged 19 and 17 seriously.

RP: We couldn’t keep up with this quick expansion. We had just five people in our Delhi office to handle all the requests from our agents. It wasn’t feasible, and there were many glitches. Sometimes the amount billed was wrong or the traveller’s name was misspelt. To ease the booking process, we started working on a B2B website so the agents could book tickets themselves. We worked up to18 hours a day studying different websites, evaluating the functionalities we required, and what we should and shouldn’t offer. We finally launched the website EaseMyTrip.com in July 2008.

NP: We knew the name was similar to the leading travel company in those years. But, we were so neck deep in getting the company up and running that we just could not spend time on getting a different name. Honestly, we wanted to go ahead with an easy option.

RP: At that time, we weren’t really thinking about long term plans for the company. We would concentrate on a very short term plan—mostly the “to-do” list for the next day—the airlines we should talk to, the kind of offers we should put up, and the travel agents we could target.

NP: We devised a simple division of work. I would handle the contracts with different airlines and work on increasing the agents network while Rikant concentrated on the operations, marketing and technology part of the business. We still follow the same bifurcation of roles.As Rikant worked on improving technology, I contacted potential agents to grow our network. We used cheaper advertising modes such as Google adverts, e-mailers and SMSes to expand our reach. In the first year, we had a turnover of Rs33 crore. And, by the year end, we had 2,500 agents and 15 employees.

RP: We could no longer work from a small space and we had already occupied three rooms in our house. The time seemed right to move out before we took over the entire house! In 2009, we moved to a 600 square feet office so we could hire more people to support the expanding network of agents. 

NP: We also wanted to start creating a sales team, all of whom were hired on a revenue sharing basis to help increase our network of travel agents. We had 30 sales people in 2010. Currently, the team has 280 people across India. 

RP: 2010 was a big year for us in other ways also. We crossed the Rs100-crore turnover threshold. So, we continued with the hiring spree as we were planning to diversify our business. We started working on a B2C website to sell air tickets directly to consumers. We finally launched it on March 2010. Of course, building the website wasn’t without great anxieties and pain. Our biggest challenge that year was to streamline the operations for the existing B2B and the new B2C website. Initially, it was the same team that was handling both the sites. That was a bad decision. Our operations were one big mess. We hired more people and gradually formed separate teams for both the websites. As we were fixing the operations, in June 2011, the website was hacked into. It was the peak season, and we were ground to a halt! No agent or customer could make bookings. Our agents were calling us non-stop. I was literally in tears. It felt as if all was lost and we will have to start from scratch. Thankfully, we retrieved the website after 12 long hours.

We knew the name was similar to a leading travel company in those years. But, we were so neck deep in getting the company up and running that we could not spend time on a different name. 

NP: Till 2011, we would get 20 per cent of our total business from the B2C segment. To expand our reach we started using mass advertisement mediums, especially radio to gain more visibility. Last year, Rikant came up with the idea to get linked with movies by becoming their travel partner. We signed a barter agreement with various production houses where we would sponsor tickets for the movie crew, and in return they would mention us in movie credits. We have done 17 movies in just over a year and a half. Housefull 2 mentions our company as their travel partner in their opening credentials. Also, at the opening ceremony of the movie Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobaara!, Imran Khan thanked our company for associating with his film. I have put that video on my website. Such initiatives have certainly helped us expand our reach.By 2012, we were able to increase our travel partners to almost 25,000. Our B2C business improved too. 25,000 visitors visit our B2C website daily. In fact, our business is evenly split between the B2B and B2C segment. We do a total of 2,500- 3,000 transactions every day across the two verticals.

RP: What makes us the most proud is that around 70 per cent of our customers have booked tickets with us at least three times. On the loyalty count, I think we beat all other travel portals. My only regret is that we didn’t launch our website earlier. If we had launched it in 2005 when we had started Duke Travels, we would have been India’s No. 1 travel company by now.