Slow travel, deliberately
Our average itinerary has 2.4 fewer stops than a comparable market package. Three nights in Hoi An beats one night each in three towns. You will spend less time in a coach and more time somewhere worth being.
A travel company built by people who kept coming back
99Travels began in a two-room office in Greater Kailash in 2011. Fifteen years on we have sent 61,400 travellers across 48 countries — and we still write every itinerary by hand.
Since 2011
How it started
Aparna Raghunathan spent nine years selling other people's package tours before she stopped believing in them. The brochures promised Switzerland and delivered four hotels near a motorway. In March 2011 she and her colleague Devendra Bhatt rented two rooms in Greater Kailash, put ₹6 lakh of savings on the table, and started selling only the trips they had personally travelled.
The first year they sold 47 holidays. Thirty-one of those travellers came back the next year. That ratio — not revenue — became the number the company managed itself by, and it still is.
Today 64 people work from the same neighbourhood, plus 180 vetted ground partners in 48 countries. We have never taken outside investment, which is why nobody upstairs has ever asked us to sell a hotel we would not stay in.
“Travel beyond expectations” is not a slogan about luxury. It means the trip should be better than the brochure, not the other way round.
Read traveller stories
What we believe
Three convictions we plan around
They shape which hotels we contract, which guides we hire and, more often, which trips we politely decline to sell.
Local guides, always
Every guide we use lives in the region they show you and is paid a day rate above the local market average, in full, regardless of shopping stops. We have no commission arrangements with emporiums — a policy that cost us a supplier in 2016 and has never been revisited.
Responsible by default
No captive-elephant experiences, no unregulated wildlife contact, no single-use plastic in our camps. Since 2019 every domestic departure includes an offset contribution we pay ourselves — it is not a line item you can decline, because it is not yours to decline.
The method
How an itinerary actually gets written
From the first call to the day you land back home, six steps, roughly eleven working days.
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Step 01 · Day 1
The listening call
Forty minutes on the phone with a destination specialist — not a salesperson. We ask what you disliked about your last holiday before we ask what you want from this one. Budget is discussed openly in the first ten minutes.
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Step 02 · Days 2–3
Route architecture
We sketch the shape of the trip before any hotel is named — how many bases, how long in each, which internal legs fly and which drive. Getting this wrong is what ruins most holidays, so we get it signed off before we cost anything.
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Step 03 · Days 4–6
Hotel and guide selection
Each property is picked from our inspected list of 1,480 hotels. If you are going somewhere we have not slept in the last 24 months, we say so on the quote and offer an alternative we have.
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Step 04 · Days 7–8
Costing, itemised
You get a line-by-line quote: air, land, guides, permits, taxes, our planning fee. The fee is visible, not buried in a markup. Two rounds of revisions are included and nobody sighs about it.
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Step 05 · Days 9–11
Confirmation and documents
A 25% deposit confirms the booking; the balance is due 21 days before departure. Visa files go to our in-house consultants, and you receive a printed and digital travel pack ten days out.
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Step 06 · On trip
The 24×7 desk
One WhatsApp number, one named duty manager per departure, answered in under seven minutes on our 2025 average. When a Kathmandu flight cancels at 5 AM, you are not the one calling the airline.
In writing
Four promises on every booking
These appear on your confirmation document, not just on this page.
01
Price transparency
Every quote is itemised and our planning fee is shown as its own line. If a supplier's rate falls before you travel, the difference is returned to you.
02
24×7 on-trip support
A named duty manager in IST plus a local ground contact in your destination time zone. Median first response in 2025: 6 minutes 40 seconds.
03
Vetted partners only
1,480 inspected properties and 180 ground operators, re-audited on a 24-month cycle. Partners who fail a review are removed, not warned.
04
No hidden costs
No fuel surcharges added after confirmation, no compulsory shopping stops, no tipping quota. What is excluded is listed as plainly as what is included.
The people
Who will actually plan your holiday
Sixty-four people in Greater Kailash. Here are eight of them, with the regions they own.
Aparna Raghunathan
Founder & Managing Director
Twenty-four years in travel, nine of them at a legacy tour operator she left in order to build this one. Still personally signs off every Antarctica and Bhutan itinerary.
Devendra Bhatt
Co-founder & Head of Operations
Runs the ground network and the duty-manager rota. Has personally driven the Manali–Leh highway eleven times and can tell you which dhaba to skip.
Meera Kulkarni
Lead Designer — Europe & Scandinavia
Twelve years designing Alpine and Nordic journeys. Fluent in German, quietly obsessive about rail timings, and the reason our Swiss itineraries never use a coach transfer where a train exists.
Rohit Nambiar
Destination Specialist — South & Southeast Asia
Grew up in Kochi, spent four years living in Chiang Mai. Owns Kerala, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, and has slept in 214 of the properties he sells.
Farhan Qureshi
Head of Visa & Documentation
Nine years of Schengen, UK, US and Japan files. His team's 98.4% approval rate is the number he is most competitive about, and he will tell you honestly when a file is weak.
Sneha Iyer
Customer Experience Lead
Reads every one of the 2,841 reviews and calls the unhappy ones herself. Built the post-trip debrief that feeds directly into which partners we keep.
Vikram Thakur
Head of Corporate & MICE
Manages travel programmes for 38 corporate accounts across NCR and Bengaluru. Ex-airline revenue side, which is why our corporate fares are what they are.
Ananya Deshmukh
Sustainability & Partner Audit
Environmental science background, joined in 2019 to build the audit framework. Has removed 23 partners from our list and has never been overruled.
Where we know the ground
Depth in 48 countries, not a brochure of 200
India & the Himalaya — 214 itineraries
Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Kerala, Rajasthan, the Andamans and the Northeast. Our deepest region, and the only one where we own our own vehicle fleet.
Southeast Asia — 168 itineraries
Bali, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia, with resident coordinators in Denpasar, Hanoi and Bangkok.
Europe — 142 itineraries
Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece, Iceland and the Nordics. Rail-first routing wherever the timetable allows.
Indian Ocean & Gulf — 76 itineraries
Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, Dubai and Abu Dhabi — our strongest honeymoon and short-escape region.
Africa, Americas & Polar — 40 itineraries
Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Peru, Japan and Antarctica. Small in number, deliberately, and every one led by a specialist.
Responsible travel
Commitments we can be held to
Published annually in our Responsible Travel Report, with the previous year's misses listed first.
Where the money stays
68% of our 2025 land spend went to locally owned suppliers — family guesthouses, independent guides, regional transport operators. Our internal floor is 60% and we publish the shortfall when we miss it, as we did in Europe last year at 54%.
- Guides paid above local market day rates, in full, no commission dependency
- Zero compulsory shopping stops on any 99Travels departure
- Supplier payment terms of 14 days, down from 45 in 2018
Footprint and wildlife
We fund verified reforestation and cookstove projects in Uttarakhand and the Western Ghats against every domestic departure, at our cost. On wildlife we follow a hard line rather than a graded one.
- No elephant rides, no captive-animal photo experiences, anywhere, ever
- Refillable bottles and filtration on all camps; single-use plastic removed in 2021
- Group sizes capped at 12 in ecologically sensitive zones
- Rail or road preferred over short-haul air on any leg under 500 km
Accreditation
Memberships and certifications
IATA Accredited Agent
TAAI Member since 2013
Ministry of Tourism Approved
IATO Active Member
ADTOI Registered
PATA India Chapter
Himalayan Tour Operators Council
Responsible Travel Charter, India — Signatory
ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management
Delhi Travel Trade Association
Registration and licence numbers are printed on every invoice and are available on request from the Greater Kailash office.
By the numbers
Fifteen years, quietly counted
0+
Travellers served
0
Countries operated in
0
Years in business
0%
Repeat traveller rate
In their words
What travellers say afterwards
4.9 out of 5 from 2,841 verified reviews collected after travel, never before.
“Our Kathmandu connection was cancelled at 5 AM. By the time we reached the counter, 99Travels had already rebooked us and messaged the hotel. I did not make a single phone call.”
Priyanka Sethi
Bhutan & Nepal · Oct 2025
“Meera talked us out of the eleven-day Europe route we asked for and gave us seven days across two bases instead. It was the first holiday I came home rested from.”
Arvind & Latika Gokhale
Switzerland & Austria · Jun 2025
“The quote had a line called ‘planning fee’. Every other agency hid it. That one line is why I have booked four trips with them since.”
Kabir Malhotra
Vietnam & Cambodia · Feb 2025
Trusted by the partners we work with
Saraya RetreatsBali & Lombok
Marisol VoyagesEurope DMC
Kanchan CampsLadakh & Spiti
Blue Atoll ResortsMaldives
Indus Rail JourneysRajasthan
Nordvik LodgesIceland & Norway
Serengeti Field Co.East Africa
Start a conversation
Tell us about the trip you keep postponing
Three lines is enough. A destination specialist will call you back within one working day — Monday to Friday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM IST.