[Exclusive Interview] World's 1st Creator Economy-Based Travel Booking Platform Is Inspiring Travellers Across India

Recently, we interacted with Mr Ashish Sidhra, co-founder of Alike.io, which is the world’s first creator economy-based platform for travel bookings that aims to establish a new way of sharing, discovering, planning and monetizing bookable travel itineraries.

Here are the interview highlights:

Q1. Could you kindly share a brief about your business venture?

A- Alike.io is the world’s first creator economy-based platform for travel bookings that aims to establish a new way of sharing, discovering, planning and monetizing bookable travel itineraries. Launched in collaboration with Dubai Tourism and with Dubai as the founding partner city, the platform offers personal studios for independent content creators to showcase their creativity by simplifying the way they create and publish their content.

The travel itineraries published by the Content Creator helps travellers discover and get inspired on where to travel and what to do via the trip stories of their favourite content creators. They can then book the experiences in those very trip stories on the same platform, without any need to grind across multiple websites to book these experiences.

Q2. Could you explain your aim behind your brand tagline, “Travel Like the people you like”?

A-Travellers are increasingly looking for personalising their trips according to their preferences and enjoy the experiences they like the most. Gone are the days when travellers could be herded around with cookie-cutter itineraries. Alike.io enables travellers to identify content creators who have similar tastes (e.g. hikers) and circumstances (parents of toddlers)  to themselves and book trips to based on the itineraries of such content creators. Thus enabling them to travel like the people they like.

Q3.- For India, the term “creator economy platforms” is completely new, and as the world’s first creator economy-based platform, do you face any difficulties in explaining the term to the people ?

A-While creator economy is a very well established and written about term in the Indian business community, you are right in pointing out that as a phrase it may not be the best way to describe our platform to the travellers and the content creators. For this very reason, in our marketing campaigns targeted at travellers and content creators, we focus on messaging and marketing phrases more relevant to these segments. “Creator economy platforms” as a phrase is primarily used in our communications focused on the business community.  

Q4. How does Alike.io empower the travelpreneurs in this space?

A-Unlike any other travel tech company, Alike.io is the world’s first endeavour where a platform shares part of its revenue with the travelpreneurs or content creators. When a traveller books a trip based on the trip itinerary of a content creator, Alike.io shares a percentage of the revenue of that booking with the content creator.

This empowers Travel Content Creators to be Self-Reliant to earn their own income, instead of being at the mercy of marketing spend of companies battling their own fires.The more trip itineraries a content creator publishers in their Alike studio, the higher the revenue generation opportunity for them.

Q5. Recently you have launched the # Dubaifreetrip campaign in collaboration with Radio City and RJ Ginnie, Kindly give some details about that brief.

A- Alike.io in collaboration with Radio City and RJ Ginnie has just concluded “#2023DubaiTripFree”, a unique campaign that offered a free trip to Dubai for 5 participants. Aimed at communicating the benefits of the Alike platform to budding as well as experienced Travel Influencers and content creators, awarding an all-expense paid trip to those content creators, who came up with the best Dubai trip ideas to help RJ Ginnie create a perfect Dubai itinerary. The campaign included 360 degree communication on Radio, outdoors, cinema halls, TV and social media. We have seen unprecedented response to campaign with record participation from content creators and influencers. The winners selected from these contest entries are content creators and influencers with a wide range of social following and represent the worlds of travel, fashion, lifestyle, food and social causes, matching the themes that define the city of Dubai. The outcomes of the campaign have been very encouraging for us with significant increase in content-creator sign-ups on the Alike platform. More importantly, we are seeing huge number of influencers reaching out to collaborate with us, once they have understood the benefits and relevance of the Alike platform to them.

Q. As we all know, the pandemic completely destroyed the travel industry, but things have changed. What do you expect from FY23 and FY24?

A-The Indian traveller has shown unprecedented zeal through 2022 to make up for the lost travel opportunities during the pandemic lockdowns. These “revenge travel” urges of 2022 will become the yearly routines in 2023 and beyond, helping continue with the growth trajectory this year and beyond. These changes in traveller behaviour combined with rapidly growing household incomes will see India’s travel and tourism revenue growing to more than USD 31bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 13.6%, according to market projections. Hence we foresee continued growth in the Indian travel market.

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