JoGuru – Personalize your Itineraries and Navigate your own Voyage

No matter how introvert, tech thirsty or cubicle dwellers we may be, but in some nook of our sage mind we want to explore and step out not into the daily runs but into uncharted waters which would be appealing and pleasing to us. That’s why we are always amazed whenever we view scenic pictures and travel service providers prove to be more magnetic than any other. But traveling should never be monotonous and should be without any applied conditions and “but’s”.

Making a Voyage should be more like, targeting a destination to explore, hang on your backpack and be a rover. Sounds more like, I am daydreaming.

But we found JoGuru, which is not another travel operator or bookings site but a travel social network, perfectly built and architected keeping the travel lovers in mind.

Joguru is built by a team of travel enthusiasts, aims at providing not only a platform for discovering destinations but also networking with like minded travelers and sharing experiences. There’s also a large amount of geeky engineering effort running behind this platform so you get the best optimized routes and don’t end up jigsawing between stations and terminals.

JoGuru has been Founded by Praveen, Saket and Karthik.

Praveen Kumar is the CEO of JoGuru and has a Management Degree from IIM Lucknow. He brings to JoGuru his 5 years of rich experience in setting up an ecommerce portals for his past organizations. Extremely passionate about traveling and exploring new places, he has occasional bouts of backpacking urge and takes off without notice, his 18 day bike trip to Himalayas being a case in point.

Saket Newaskar is the social media wizard at JoGuru and manages product development and roadmap. He has over 5 years of experience in Product Development, Product Management and Business Development across the Globe. Passionate about anything Internet or travel, he has been to more than 20 countries till date and dreams of covering the UN.

Karthik Ramachandra has a has a Master’s degree in Marketing Management from IIM Indore. He brings to JoGuru over 2 years of experience in Business Development for new products and new markets.

We had an opportunity to get in conversation with Praveen, and know more about this innovative platform JoGuru.

Can you give us a brief about JoGuru, How does it differ from from other travel services? And how does it work?

JoGuru is essentially a social travel Network. It offers travel info like places to see and visit, hangout spots, eat-outs, accommodation and a platform to plan a trip itinerary. Content on JoGuru is convened by its users. It is real experiences and travel info which our user put together to help other travelers.

Earlier this week we launched our flagship product called “Itinerary Planner”. We mostly stand out from the crowd with the evolution of advanced product like this.

We are very different from all of them in three aspects:

1. We have an algorithm that produces optimized travel route that demonstrates sequence of places to visit as per distance between them and their opening and closing times.

2. The design is completely different from all the other products and it is extremely easy and engaging for the users to use.

3. The itineraries are directly accessible through Google search queries.

We are the only one to offer a itinerary plan between two countries. User may use JoGuru for various reasons. Some might just want to know about something and the person can drop his travel related question which will later be answered by travel experts. Some people come to plan their vacation. They can go through the easily available travel guide on JoGuru and end up using an Itinerary Planner to list down where they all will visit and by what time. There are ready made itineraries which can be altered as per ones need. Creating itineraries is simple too. All you need to do is select places and drag and drop them to the timeline.

In this era of cost cutting, how does JoGuru prove beneficial compared to its competitor?

JoGuru is free for all. One doesn’t need to pay $30 to get readymade itinerary nor do they need to pay to get info on city guides. We are assured that travel agents will be a passé when you have a podium like JoGuru to refer at. Also, one doesn’t need to reach level A or B or earn points to ask questions. It’s literally FREE.

What were the researches and insights you went through before coming up with the idea? And why the name JoGuru?

We did an intensive study for over a year on the current travel planning trends globally. We found out that today the user has to spend a significant amount of time online to plan a perfect trip which may involve multiple cities, multiple destinations and multiple preferences – 8 to 20 websites, 5 to 40 google queries, 0 to 3 questions postings on social networking forums. 2 hrs to 2 weeks, of time  before a  travel plan is finalized and a booking is confirmed . It’s a lot of Hard Work  before a fun vacation is booked!!. Therefore the Idea of JoGuru.

JoGuru is basically an acronym for Journey Guru.

Can you tell us something about the algorithm and the technology behind JoGuru that helps travelers plan out the best Itinerary for them?

Most of the time, a user plans an itinerary to a place of which he knows very little about. It is extremely important to let the user know about the best transportation modes, best routes, open and closing times etc., to make an efficient plan.

When a user selects a particular order of addas/attractions for his itinerary, We suggest the user that we can optimize the route he has selected (This is prompted only after we check a few initial conditions).

Our ingenious algorithm takes into consideration all these variables and produces an optimized route.

JoGuru’s itineraries are accessible in google search queries as well, this is something new, tell us something about this feature?

In today’s era, people Google right from “how to make pizza” to “how to gain or lose weight”. Whenever a user searches for a travel itinerary, we wanted to be up there directly providing him what he needs rather than a DIY (Do it yourself) process. Therefore we got an idea of making them public and free searchable by search engines. We have also done a bit of SEO on them so that they get ranked in search engines and are easily available.

What are your future plans for JoGuru?

Our next set of goal is to make JoGuru even better and start with a revenue generation program.

In next three months we aim to add a database of hotels to our itineraries and add 500 plus cities to their list of itineraries. We want to make our algorithm even stronger and intelligent to meet travelers expectations. We recently have changed the way we look. JoGuru has been revamped. We hope people will like the new look which is more engaging.