when entrepreneurs consider testing times to be the best thing that happened to them you know they have embraced resilience travel tech startup pickyourtrail pyt took a nosedive during covid19 with revenue touching near zero for 68 months but cofounders hari ganapathy and srinath shankar say the period was valuable in many ways our understanding of ourselves of the business of the industry and the way our team stood by us was a huge learning we are now ready for any crisis as no industry went through what travel saw ganapathy says pyts investors backed the duo to make their own decisions prompting the founders to have an open chat with the full team and consult them on the next steps all team members decided to take pay cuts ranging from 5080 to keep the ship sailing now revenue has grown three times from that of the pandemic period thanks to revenge travel which the company has leveragedlaunched in 2014 pyt is a holiday booking platform that allows users to curate their international travel itinerary based on their interests budget and trip duration those not very diy do it yourself savvy get support from pyt representatives and partners it all began in 2013 when the cofounders personalised their europe trips at a time when group tours dominated international travelall we had at the time was experience of planning our travel and that of our friends but no contacts in the travel industry we built that from scratch says ganapathyfrom 2014 to 2016 they learned the ropes by planning trips for friends and family in 2016 the company was ready with its first product personalised vacation options to bali europe and other locations came later there has been no looking back ganapathy says a fanatical obsession with customer experience and focus on brand integrity have defined their journeya vacation is a lifelong memory and that is why we need to deliver great experiences on every single trip he says this helped the bootstrapped startup get repeat customers despite low marketing spendsby mid2018 pyt managed to raise a small round of funding from entrepreneurs girish mathrubootham kumar vembu and shyam shekar having operators themselves on board as investors was the best thing that could happen to us they were able to empathise with us all the way say ganapathythe startup is now handling volumes like neverbefore for instance maldives has seen a 4x growth in incoming travel compared to 2019 recession or not revenge travel is real and there is no sign of demand coming down says shankar pyt has now gone global setting up an office in dubai started as an experiment during the pandemic influencer marketing has really clicked for the chennai startup which got olympian neeraj chopra and actor aishwarya rai bachchan to endorse ittoday the company is on its way to addressing every travel need of an individual be it staycations international travel or a stealth product that has the founders most excited pyt is also setting