When travelling, a lot of people need rooms for few hours either at religious places or during transit or if they are visiting other cities for trade fairs but don’t like to pay entire cost. Taking this bracket into consideration and understanding different people have different time requirements within a limited time slot, DayHalt attempts to cater to their needs.
Dayhalt is an online portal to book rooms for dayuse. [pullquote align=”right”]It’s an online reservation site but only during daytime for a fixed hours where in other booking sites provide rooms for 1N stay i.e for 24 hours, DayHalt offers rooms between 6 am to 10 pm.[/pullquote]
The startup was founded by Manish Golchha and PrabaKaran, who found each other via therodinhoods.com.
The Team
Manish Golchha – after completing his engineering degree worked for more than 5 years in Mahindra Holidays & Resorts and later started his own travel company which is running successfully from past 2 years. He loves to meet new people and exploring different places. Even he is a organizer of meetup group Events & Vacation in Mumbai.
Prabakaran – is a Final year Engineering student at Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai. He started developing Web application as a hobby 3 years ago and now he is a professional web developer. He chose the path of entreprenuership while he is a college student.
Early Stage Challenges and the Progress
Initially DayHalt was started with a focus on corporate traveler but after feedbacks from a lot of people have started focusing on low budget hotels as well so that every individual avails the benefits.
Ongoing with the Q&A with Manish, he mentioned, that, at the begining things were tough as the hoteliers are reluctant and don’t wont to dilute their rates by displaying online. So, they took on a challenge to design a busines model which works as a win-win situation for the customer, the hotelier and DayHalt; and now they have started hitting the bulls eye.
The one key feature that gives DayHalt a little edge above other online reservation portals is that, they do not list all the hotels, focusing on just 4 to 6 cities for now they have been working with limited number of hotels as per Quality, Location & ease to reach.
Manish Golchha and Prabakaran – Team DayHalt
Manish’s advice to Travel Startups and all Entrepreneurs
- Travel Industry is easy to start (Glamourous from outside) but difficult to sustain for long run if you don’t focus on innovation & customer support. Of course cost is the major factor but now a days, people don’ mind to pay extra if they know, you are providing good service to them.
- Always have a habit to help others without thinking any returns & Networking.
- Don’t start alone & do proper market research of your idea by getting our of your comfort zone before plunge on it.
Sharing DayHalt’s future plans with us, Manish said, “We are focusing more on budget hotel tie-ups and core team. Soon you will see a version 2.0 of our website with some unique and attractive features which we are building after getting lot of feedback and suggestion from our customers & advisors. We are looking for incubation & funding to grow faster.”
TTP’s take on DayHalt
Observing the competition and the market demands of the cost cutting era, we believe that team DayHalt will have to work a bit more on the rates and also need to speed up to include more hotels and stays for offer. We wish the team all the best of luck and may catch them again to learn more about their entrepreneur journey.
