Getting a venue for an event can be difficult – and options for finding a banquet hall on the internet are limited to sites like Zomato and MakeMyTrip, hardly adequate for finding such a venue and finalizing the booking. Sabin Rodriguez came up with the idea for BigFday.com after he had the experience of it taking a week to finalize the venue for a cousin’s father’s birthday celebration, and there not being any adequate platform to do this. So Sabin quickly came up with a plan for his idea, and after some time realized that he would need technology at the product’s core – so he brought his friend of eight years, Utkarsh Singhania, on board as Chief Technical Officer. Convincing Utkarsh was an easy task – they went for lunch one day, and by the end of it, Utkarsh decided to commit, agreeing with Sabin that finding venues in Chennai is a huge problem that needs to be solved. They both decided to finish their commitments before jumping into the development of BigFday full-time, before committing themselves to the project fully in June 2014.
BigFday makes it easy for you to book a venue for a day, without all of the shopping around, haggling, or headaches that this usually entails. The BigFday team consider themselves to be excitement hunters extraordinaire, and thus it’s of little difficulty for them to find you a list of venues which conform to your needs. The target audience includes professional event planners as well as anyone else who is planning an event, and there is little competition for such a platform within India because the market has yet to expand. Major competition for BigFday comes from sources such as established travel agents, hotel sales teams, and event planners. Currently the team runs around Chennai to collect details such as seating capacity, menu choices, and dimensions of the space from venues. They also send photographers to venues to shoot photographs for users to make a decision online, without needing to go there in person. Realistically, the price at a venue changes based on factors such as the date of the event, number of guests, type of food served, and even other things due to constant change in supply and demand – sometimes more volatile than the SENSEX. It is difficult for consumers to get data online or from multiple venues with a single call, but now BigFday has solved this. BigFday also negotiates for you – the final price of a venue is plus or minus 50% (of the initial rate they quote), depending on your negotiation skills. For their customers, BigFday will negotiate and the customers can just chill. And BigFday will collect advance if the business requests, so there’s no need for customers to visit a hotel unless they really want to. And it’s free for users.
As of right now, BigFday works primarily with hotels in Chennai. In a few months from now, they will also add another 1000 marriage halls/mandapams, farmhouses and standalone party halls to their growing inventory. No one should have to go to another place for booking a venue for an occasion in Chennai. After that, they will replicate this model in multiple cities across India.