A Social Platform For Lonesome Travellers (and Locals)

Making friends in any big city, let alone one like Mumbai, can be troublesome. What’s a recently-returned or newly-moved social bird to do in that case? It was this conundrum that spurred friends and former classmates Hersh Kumbhani and Ashish Mehra to start Trabblr.com, a social networking site that gives locals and travellers a platform to meet in person. “I travelled to Bulgaria and Macedonia and the rest of the Balkans and it was tough to do local things and meet local people,” says Kumbhani who chucked up a job in banking in New York and returned to Mumbai in 2008.

The concept is simple: you sign up for any of Trabblr’s featured events (they range from a Dhobi Talao bar crawl to sailing expeditions around the bay), show up on the day and meet the other 10 or 15 people who’ve done the same. If you like, you can create your own events, which can range from dinner at Pali Village Cafe to flamingo watching in Sewri or catching an IPL match or an art show. Kumbhani says you can’t pick and choose who you’d like to meet, making the mix of people entirely random, and as likely to be comprised of locals as it is of tourists from the US, Hong Kong, Italy or Japan. Featured events—meaning those put up by the founders—do require you to pay a fee to reserve your spot, though user-submitted events are free except for the amount you pay for your dinner, tickets or other expenses. So far, the site has already notched up 600 members, and spans two cities, Mumbai and London. Kumbhani says they plan to expand to other cities in India and across the world soon.

Visit Trabblr.com for more information.