July 22, 2022

Travel-tech startup from COHORT 3.0, Oddessemania, is collaborating with Assam Tourism Development Corporation (ATDC) to build a platform for on-boarding trained travel guides in the state. This would give the qualified guides in Assam a much-needed exposure among the travellers, who can now easily browse and select a guide to suit their itinerary.

Assam has over 600 registered guides. Unfortunately, there aren’t any organised platforms for tourists to search and find local guides based on their requirements. While there is a gamut of travel agencies conducting trips to the region, most of the guides provided by them aren’t trained, lacking proper knowledge of the place and mostly ill-equipped to deal with unsolicited situations during the trip.

Along with building the platform for ATDC that will on-board the existing 600+ registered guides, Oddessemania is also the official partner of Assam Tourism, vested to provide certified and trained guides, who will subsequently be on-boarded on the platform post the training.

The collaboration took shape after ATDC had learnt about Oddessemania’s own travel-tech platform, promoting guide-aided travel for tourists to have an immersive local experience.

Oddessemania is a first-of-its-kind platform to facilitate pre-travel guide booking. Trained and experienced guides are on-boarded on the platform based on their specialty, for travellers to select them based on the itinerary and availability. The guides are specifically selected from the local community, who go through thorough training facilitated by the startup before getting on-boarded on the platform. To date, the startup has on-boarded over 80 guides on its platform from across India who are thoroughly trained to lead the trips that also include arranging for conveyance and homestays.

The platform further facilitates the travellers to visually plan their itineraries using maps. It gives users the flexibility to amend and update the travel itinerary, along with a user-permitted safety feature for tracking the travel.

While addressing the travellers’ hassles in finding guides who could help them enjoy immersive local experience, Oddessemania is also impacting the socio-economic environment of the country in general and North East India in particular, by creating lucrative employment opportunities in the guided tourism space.