The weekend helpers

Thanks to word “Weekend”, which originally evolved from the northern side and got fixed into every working individual as it gives relaxation from the another antagonist word “stress”. As soon as weekend strikes into our mind we generally start thinking about adventure trips, fun parks and so on.

The next question that arises in our mind is planning, where to and go how to go, then start gathering information about the destination from various sources and by the time we fix an itinerary and hit the road there will be many instances that we have almost landed on Monday.

To overcome such scenario a team of young, talented and highly educated from India’s most prestigious institutes came up with an idea of helping people to plan their weekend’s holiday trips in easier and simplest ways. Co-founders Rupesh Jha - IIT, Ganesh - IIM, Sudheer- IIM and Shilpa- IIM, have started their website ‘weekendthrill.com’, an exclusive portal for discovering, planning and buying the things to do over a weekend.

Weekend Thrill is all about things to do over a weekend. It has information about places to visit near your city, amusement parks, resorts, sports facilities, etc. There is also an online travel marketplace, where you can explore and book various activities right from leisure outing to extreme adventures like skydiving.

“We currently run major business through our Facebook page, which has an organic fan following of 121,000+ people. We also send dedicated e-mailers to our newsletter subscriber base of 6000+ people,” Ganesh one of the Co-founder, shares.

When asked about the motivation behind this Ganesh says, “During our previous job, Rupesh and I wanted to go and play sports but found it difficult to search for venues. Information is very scattered on the internet.

There is no single portal which would give us complete information about things that we could do over the weekend. That’s where we thought of starting weekendthrill.com. Later, Sudheer and Shilpa joined us and together co-founded the company.”

Is this information really beneficial to the users? “Vendors who conduct adventure activities are mostly on the field and will not be able to attend to the customers and answer their queries. Hence customers would find it difficult to decide on their trip. Weekendthrill.com makes it easy by providing all the information at one place and also provides a mechanism to compare different itineraries. Hence it is useful for both vendors and customers.”

When we talk about their current geographical area covered and areas of expansion, Ganesh informs, “Right now we sell adventure and leisure trip packages around Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

Geographically we are planning to expand to all major cities in India. In terms of services, we are planning to expand to areas such as booking sports arenas, fun parks, resorts, etc. We want to be the one portal, where people can buy anything that they would like to experience over the weekends.”

And finally when we talk about the budget and customer packages, Ganesh says, “For adventure trips, we provide fixed departures, where anyone can join the team that is already going on the trip. However, if customers make a group of their own, we will arrange for a customised trip for them based on their requirement.

When it comes to leisure trip, we have multiple itineraries to suit the budget requirement of different categories. In case a customer wants an entirely different package from what we already have, they can contact us and we will customise the package for them too.”

By: H Sirish