By Uwin Lugoda While going on vacation sounds fun, flexibility while travelling can be hard to find on the road. Everything usually needs to be planned ahead, from your accommodation to the activities you partake in. Having the luxury to find last-minute deals on hotels and experiences is an ability most travellers wish they had. This is where an app called Pikanite comes in. Praveen Premkumar, Co-founder of Pikanite, came up with the idea for the app while travelling for work and finding out that most hotels had at least one or two available rooms at any given point. Looking for ways to utilise this inventory, Praveen started doing research to see if there were any other apps or companies getting this out there. “I took some time off work for a couple of months, did some more research and travelled to Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and around Sri Lanka; all the while speaking to hotels on if there was an actual need for a solution like this.” The first prototype for Pikanite was ready by September, 2017, and went on to gather a lot of positive feedback. By January, 2018, the app was ready for beta testing. Pikanite finally launched on the first week of March with just five to ten hotels that partnered up with their app. Fast forward nine months, and today, Pikanite has an inventory of 300-plus hotels, and has added a whole new module that deals exclusively with experiences, to its platform. Pikanite is best explained as a modern lifestyle app that holds the best last-minute inventories; from hotels and experience deals across the country, the name is a play on the words “pick a night”. The app is targeted mainly towards millennial travellers who are already on the move, or travel frequently with a need for accommodations every few days. Pikanite is a platform for travellers from every background. Once on the app you can find $ 200-plus rooms from the likes of Kingsbury and Cinnamon Grand, to bunk beds that go for $ 10 a night. According to Praveen, Pikanite looks to solve two problems, the first of which is to try and sell the unsold inventories at hotels, so that the hotels get a little bit more revenue, and therefore their margin revenue increases. The second is to make sure that the traveller gets a better deal from the last-minute cancellations. Customised travel experiences Pikanite now customises experiences according to the area in which you are staying. Praveen explains it best: “If someone books a room in Mirrisa, they can also schedule a surf lesson, or whale watching.” “Initially, if someone wanted to get an experience, they’d go to trip advisor, they would see the experience listed there, then they would mail that experience provider and then there would be an exchange of emails between them before coming to an agreement as to how they would design their itinerary. We’ve automated that entire process.” Unlike the last-minute hotel deals that can be booked only 48 hours in advance; the experiences have no time constraints. The experiences can be booked even a week in advance. The experience feature, although still in its beta phase, has gathered a lot of interest from experience partners and clients alike. “If you look at our clientele, it’s 93% foreigners and 7% locals. But now, even locals are looking for experiences like trekking, camping, or learning how to surf. We had one lady who went for surf lessons every other week.” Funding the biggest hurdle Moving on to their financials, Praveen explained that their revenue model works on the basis of getting a commission off each concluded transaction that happens on their platform. Pikanite being a marketplace model, they are looking towards building a stage with the high volumes of transactions that happen daily. With this goal in mind Praveen is confident that in the next two-and-a-half years Pikanite will not only be extremely profitable, but will go global as well. According to Praveen, their competition lies in apps and websites, like Airbnb and Booking.com. But Pikanite manages to stand out by curating their deals to only licensed institutions and the best last-minute deals. Praveen also spoke out about the problems that Pikanite faced and are still currently facing, as a start-up in Sri Lanka. He pointed out that when starting Pikanite, some of the biggest problems they faced were getting people to take them seriously and putting together a good team. They spent a year putting together a team of 15 individuals, with more than half being tech-based and the others for operations and marketing. The problem they are currently facing is finding funding to go international. “One of the biggest challengers is to find venture capital to expand; we were very adept at raising our first round. The thing is when you grow bigger, there is no example of a Sri Lankan app that has gone global, and if you really look at it there has been no start-up that has said, ‘hey, we are going to go global’. For us, it’s possible to expand geographically, we know the cost behind it and our tech can be deployed across the world. The problem is someone needs to take a bet on it.” As for their future plans, Praveen explained that they are looking to expand into new countries like Singapore and certain parts of India. They also plan on upgrading their tech to involve AI in the system that will customise the deals to fit the traveller, taking their prior activities on the app to account. The app will also be better integrated to help the hotel and experience partners optimise new deals so they can have better transactions.