Srivathsan G K spent seven years in Thailand, from 2014 to 2021. What he saw there became a company.

It was long enough in the country to stop being a tourist and start noticing how it actually worked. Things he had seen kept bothering him: Indian tourists getting misled and overcharged. Simply being promised one trip and handed another.

What struck him most was that there were families who had saved for months, sometimes years, for a single holiday abroad. Srivathsan noticed that many travellers from his home state, Tamil Nadu, struggled to find a company they could trust to plan a trip to Thailand.

Seeing travellers save for months, sometimes years, only to end up disappointed stayed with him.

What most of this industry gets wrong

Indian travellers don't trust travel brands, and they're right not to. This changes when founders stop being defensive and accept that customer scepticism is earned.

Most travel companies are built to sell packages. The whole process focuses on closing the booking, and everything else, the honesty, the execution, and the follow-through, comes second.

Customers can sense a purely transactional mindset, even when they can't name it. So they hesitate. They ask the same question five times. They repeat this with ten operators and still feel uneasy about handing over the money.

Srivathsan sees it as a trust problem, and discounts don't fix trust. In his view, a price drop can make travellers question the real value.

Starting Dimaak with four people and one rule

Srivathsan's background is in commerce and accounting, and he has spent years building technology businesses, including a live-streaming software company he still runs.

He came into travel as an outsider, which he thinks helped. He built the brand around customers' needs rather than trying to copy how other agencies operated. He was trying to fix what he had seen them do wrong.

So, in 2019, he started Dimaak Tours. Four people, a small office in Bangalore, one focus: serving Indian travellers going to Thailand and doing it honestly.

That meant one rule the company never bent. No bait-and-switch quotes. No hidden markups.

The decision after COVID: teach, don't sell

Then COVID arrived, bringing the travel world to a halt.

For a company whose entire business was flying Indian families to Thailand, that wasn't a slowdown. It was a question of surviving when nobody was booking trips.

During those difficult times, he did the one thing he could do best: observe. He started paying attention to how people were engaging with travel content.

People continued saving posts about places they couldn't visit. They kept planning trips, even though nobody knew when travel would return to normal.

So, instead of selling, Dimaak Tours taught. It was a direction Srivathsan had wanted to take for a while.

"When you teach someone, you build trust. And once you have trust, you can build a real brand," he says. That thought shaped the company's whole strategy.

How teaching became the marketing strategy 

Dimaak Tours put out honest takes on destinations, including the ones people romanticise but shouldn't book blindly. It broke down real costs so travellers could see exactly where their money went.

They highlighted common scams and pricing traps that first-time travellers often fall into. The content walked people through planning a holiday step by step.

Later, they started producing long-form content. These podcast-style videos, which ran for over an hour, were the format that surprised Srivathsan the most.

People watched the full ninety minutes. Then they would call, not to complain, but to say the content had taught them something and that they wanted to travel with the company.

That was the moment 'teaching, not selling' stopped being just a nice idea and started driving real growth. The content did the convincing, so by the time someone reached the team, the trust was already there.

The trust reflected in the data

The story Srivathsan told us was visible in recent data. Dimaak's content reached 20 million people, and the account now has over 318,000 followers. 

People saved the company's posts 200,427 times. The engagement rate of 23.1% is higher than most brand accounts.

This showed people choosing to trust the brand before it had ever asked them for a rupee.

50,000 travellers later

Today, Dimaak has served more than 50,000 travellers. It has grown from four people in Bangalore to a team of over fifty, with its headquarters now in Chennai.

The trips Srivathsan is proudest of are the multi-generation family holidays, with grandparents, parents, and children travelling together. Those are the ones families plan for years, and Srivathsan can least afford to let go wrong. Getting those right is the clearest proof that the trust the company built actually means something.

What he'd tell another founder

His advice to other founders is simple: teaching is the most underrated form of marketing.

The proof is that Dimaak rebuilt a travel company in the middle of COVID. He made sure to keep the momentum going despite having no bookings. The team focused on answering questions and helping travellers make better decisions.

In Srivathsan's telling, build trust first. The growth follows.