1. Let’s introduce yourself, your academic background, and your career journey before starting as an entrepreneur.

After finishing my O-Levels and A-Levels, I enrolled in the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program at North South University. I majored in both Marketing and Human Resources (HR). Initially, I aspired to work in HR and bring revolution to the industry. With time, I realized that a marketing career would be more suitable for me as I would be able to operate more creatively. Thus, I joined Grameenphone in their marketing department immediately after my graduation. While working there, our portfolio covered various aspects, starting from brand campaigns, tactical campaigns, and different value-added service categories. After serving Grameenphone for four and a half years, I joined BBC Media Action, formerly BBC World Service Trust, to further explore my career. BBC Media Action primarily focused on providing education to the rural and semi rural base by developing content and disseminating it through different agencies and other non-government organizations. It was quite an insightful experience working with the organization. Later, I joined Nokia as their marketing manager and worked there for nine months. After this, I returned to the telecom industry by joining Banglalink. At Banglalink, I looked after the mother brand marketing section. I worked at Banglalink for three and a half years. 

2. What motivated you to become an entrepreneur despite having a stable career at such renowned organizations?

My husband, Kashef Rahman, the Co-founder of ShareTrip, and I are both passionate about traveling and exploring new places. We used to travel at least twice a year and managed to explore many countries on a budget. While at our corporate jobs, we visited countries in the Asian region, Europe, London, China, and many more. We figured out we could add a lot of value for travel enthusiasts as our colleagues, friends, and extended family members often approached us for travel suggestions. 

Adding value for travelers was our primary motivation behind initiating our venture. In 2016, I left my corporate job and started working on Travel Booking Bangladesh, which was later rebranded as ShareTrip. Initially, we formed Travel Booking Bangladesh in 2014 as an offline agency, but we wanted to do something beyond that. We started with a limited capacity, having only 3-4 employees, and partnered up with a tech company that developed our website on a small scale. While doing so, fortunately, we were looked up by our current investors, who reached out to us for a collaboration. Back then, we imagined Travel Booking Bangladesh only as an establishment we planned to work on, but the magic happened when we discussed the prospect of our venture on a bigger scale with our investors. We planned to expand our operation in all aspects, starting from human resources, products, services, and innovations. We wanted to break through the offline market and establish our online presence. They tried to strengthen their presence in Bangladesh and penetrate this ecosystem, so our collaboration was a win-win situation. We received the investment in 2018 and rebranded Travel Booking Bangladesh to ShareTrip, with a complete package of all ranges of travel solutions to differentiate ourselves from the traditional market with a refreshed name, brand image, and services. 

We are the first travel platform in the country to launch B2C-driven platforms on Android, iOS, and a website. A complete end-to-end solution for travellers. We provided tickets, hotels, holiday packages, visa services, and everything you need to plan your travel. In addition to that, we added gamification features to distinguish our platform from others. Usually, you only log in when you have any requirements in availing of travel services, but we wanted to move beyond that with our application. We wanted people to engage with our service and get to know us better. In 2018, there was hardly any penetration in the online traveling market as the travel agencies mainly operated offline. We wanted to provide a good experience beyond our travel services through gamification as the users always look for more. We introduced a Spin-to-Win game and a Q&A game through our application which drove the customers toward our platform. This enabled us to interact with the customers and provided invaluable customer insights as we got statistical data on customers’ preferences. We could cater to them according to their needs. That was the first time a travel service platform added gamification within a service app and website in Bangladesh. We have received an overwhelming response as the gamification gave customers a positive impression. We also offered incentives and loyalty points that you could avail of through booking services and playing games, which also positively impacted customers. 

3. Give us a short glimpse into the journey of ShareTrip and an overview of its operations.

Since Kashef, my husband and the company’s co-founder, and I have worked in corporate and MNCs for quite a few years, we clearly understood how to form a company and the key parameters to run the business effectively. Although we had a small organizational capacity since we started small, our vision was not just building a name or a portfolio; we wanted to create an organization. That is what we are working on to date. When we formed our company, we had an initial vision as we wanted people to feel good about the company while joining us. Therefore, we have figured out the key elements which are required. So, if you look into ShareTrip right now, we have all the core departments, Unit Heads, and proper hierarchy organized in a structured way. We have our tech team who develop our products from scratch instead of outsourcing them from any third-party organization. We are the first company to build everything from scratch by our local people through our local tech, which is something we take extreme pride in. 

Currently, we have our tech and marketing teams, where we have also built in-house creative, campaign management, and product development teams. We have multiple segments in our sales teams, categorizing from corporate sales, units for our direct customers, and address our B2B agents. Overall, we have crafted all the parameters to run the organization smoothly. We have focused on building our team from the beginning. Initially, we started as a team of 3, now expanding to a group of 160+ members, the largest unit in Bangladesh within the travel ecosystem. We want to give people the experience through our service, which will drive them towards ShareTrip again and again. We excel in providing superior customer support and seamless after-sales support. Due to that, we have achieved an 80% retention rate where our loyal base returns to avail of our services again and again, which is higher than global standards of the retention metrics for OTAs. We are working relentlessly to keep sustaining that position in the coming days.

4. How have you incorporated your marketing expertise with entrepreneurial roles to grow your ventures?

It was a blend of ease and new challenges for me, as my marketing skills were based primarily on telco operations. Although I knew how to engage and hook telco customers, the travel industry was relatively new to me and a challenge initially to establish proper communication. Overall, it was something that I adapted through trial and error at the beginning stages of our journey. Since I previously worked in the marketing industry, I had an initial idea of how and where we should target to increase effectiveness. Alongside that, I had a brilliant team right from the beginning. The marketing team we had when we rebranded Travel Booking Bangladesh to ShareTrip was full of bright minds, beautiful ideas, excellent execution, and innovation. The theoretical and practical applications of my work experience helped me a lot while initiating my own travel space. The only challenge was knowing the ecosystem and how the people would react to an online travel agency, as most agencies still operate offline. We broke the barrier and established ourselves not only as a successful OTA platform but also as the leading one in the country. We catered to our customers successfully at the same time and maintained a strong liaison with our other stakeholders, including below-the-line agents, travel regulatory bodies, partners, and airlines successfully. We also worked on partnerships, strategies, onboarding suppliers, and contributing to the ecosystem. We are glad that we have been executing all our operations very smoothly. 

5. What challenges have you faced as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome these?

The main challenge we faced was changing the people’s perception towards the online travel space. An assumption that foreign products are better than our own products was widely prevalent. This was also the case for online travel agencies. People preferred to take travel services from a global OTA despite their limitations. We have successfully overcome the problem through our uniqueness and quality of service. Another issue that persists today is mainly regarding the ecosystem. There are many limitations, especially at the regulatory and policy level. We are moving towards a digital era where all the industries are getting digitized. It is high time to bring a technological transition to the travel industry. We are still a decade behind compared to neighboring countries considering the development of the travel ecosystem. It is essential to bring positive regulatory changes to take our online travel agency industry further. We are collectively working on resolving the issue with regulatory bodies like the ICT ministry and airlines such as our National Carrier, Biman Bangladesh Airlines, to get some positive changes to the industry. Travel has become an essential part of our lives, and there are a lot of booming opportunities for the industry to flourish. We are working towards achieving the goal of making the travel industry better not only for ShareTrip but also for other OTAs in Bangladesh. 

6. As a business entrepreneur and individual, what goals do you wish to achieve?

There’s no end to what you want to achieve, and with ShareTrip, we want to break down barriers and boundaries. The current vision we are progressing towards is to sustain being the market leader in Bangladesh. We want to be the name that comes at the top of the mind of people whenever they think about traveling. We are heading towards the goal successfully as we currently own approximately 50% of the online travel space despite the pandemic. We now have more than 12% of the entire travel market, which is an excellent achievement for any OTA.

Another thing we want to achieve through our work is to attract more and more foreign people to visit our country through our platform. We want to showcase the beauty of Bangladesh. As you see, much work is going on to improve the tourism sector from both public and private levels. These are the critical assets to leverage the tourism sector, and we aim to be the hub for that. We know that most tourists visiting Indonesia are from Bangladesh. Medical visas to India are primarily from Bangladesh; we also want to see the reverse action. That is one of our visions on which we are working continuously, hoping to see positive changes in the coming days. 

We plan to expand our horizons across borders, but the regulatory process and approval required from the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism are still yet to be publicised for the travel market. We are still working on that to look into the avenues to ensure that the transition, when made, is smooth, and we will take our next steps based on emerging circumstances.