This week I am talking with Krishna Teja, who founded Think Places, a site designed to put you right in touch with the travel experts from your community who can help you design the travel experience you want. He has some great thoughts on why he founded the company and what’s next. Enjoy!
1) What do you do?
I am the founder of Think Places. Think Places is a marketplace where travelers can find, schedule and pay for calls with experts around the world to help them plan a great trip. Our expert community includes popular travel bloggers and travel writers who come from the world’s top travel publications like Lonely planet, BBC travel, New york times etc.
Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. It’s a very exciting time for the sharing economy and I am thrilled to be a part of it.
2) Why do you do what you do?
In 2011, I went on a lovely backpacking trip to Europe. While, the trip was quite enjoyable, the planning – not so much! On an average, I spent at least 2 to 3 hours every day for a month to plan this trip. It was a nightmare to come up with a practical itinerary.
There were 3 main problems with planning your trip online:
- Information overload – its hard to find information based on your interests.
- There was a ton of out dated information
- It’s difficult to get a locals perspective on the city.
So as a recent computer graduate from the University of Toronto, I decided to solve the problem!
3) What are you most excited about right now?
Its always exciting to talk to customers especially when they really like the service you offer. We are also implementing a bunch of cool features so I am excited to see them go live.
4) What’s next for you?
I am contacting several experts to expand our list. we would like to reach a stage where we have an expert for every place on earth including the remotest of places. Apart from that, I am also going to approach a few journalists who are interested in writing about our story.
5) What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?
How far your food travels has serious consequences for your health and the climate. I strongly believe in, and support the local food movement. Eating local foods is better for you, for the environment, and for your taste buds.
If you’re keen to connect with Krishna further, you can find his current location on his OHW profile. A big thanks to Krishna for sharing his motivations and current projects. If you’d like to connect on social media with Think Places:
Think Places on Facebook and Twitter
We regularly feature a number of other travel tech entrepreneurs; if you are an entrepreneur in the travel vertical, and want to be profiled, please sign up for an OHW account and add “travel tech entrepreneurs” as an interest on your profile — then shoot me an email (drew at ohheyworld).
Shannon O'Donnell
A storyteller and knowledge-seeker captivated by the world. Formally an actress and web-nerd, I left in 2008 to travel solo, volunteer, and hunt down delicious vegetarian eats all over the world. She recently published "The Volunteer Traveler’s Handbook, and her travel stories and photography are recorded on her world travel blog, A Little Adrift.
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