Not a bigger catalogue. A trip you can read end to end before you ask anyone anything, a rate printed on the page, and three things nobody else bothers to include.
Three things in every trip we plan, at no extra cost, whether you are going to Manali or Malaysia.
Four hundred photos nobody opens again. We take the footage from your trip and cut it into a proper short film — the drive up, the first sight of the valley, your mother laughing at something — and send it within a week of your return.
Delivered in 7 daysA complimentary one-hour shoot with a professional photographer at an iconic spot on your route, so the moments that matter are captured properly.
One hour, complimentaryWe ask our drivers and our guides where they eat. That is the list you get — the place down the lane with six tables, not the one with the English menu outside.
Handpicked by localsLuxury in experience, simplicity in travel — curated journeys designed around you.
You know the routine. A glossy page, six nights, four cities, one big number at the bottom and absolutely no way of working out how anyone arrived at it. Ask what the hotel is and you get “3-star or similar”. Ask to drop a city and you are told to ring the office.
We put the whole thing on the page instead. Open any trip and you can read it end to end before you speak to a soul — day one to the flight home, where you sleep each night, which meals are on us, and the rate per head printed right there. Then you tell us what you want moved, and we move it.
Nothing on this site takes a payment, and nothing here is a sales funnel. Send us your dates and a planner who has actually been to the place checks what is open, then writes back with the real figure. If the season is wrong for what you have in mind, we will say so — even when it costs us the booking.
The full day-wise plan and the rate per head are on the page before you give us a phone number. Read the whole trip, then decide whether to write in.
The rate we run the trip at, per head, on the minimum group stated. Not a teaser figure that grows once someone rings you back.
Rates move with season, availability and supplier revisions — we will not pretend otherwise. The figure that binds is the one a planner sends you in writing.
Phone, mail or WhatsApp, straight through to the Siliguri and Bengaluru desks. You get the same planner from the first message to the last.
Explore Karo is a holiday planning company working out of Siliguri and Bengaluru, building trips for Indian travellers.
Explore Karo started because the two of us kept planning other people's holidays for free — friends, cousins, colleagues who wanted the Sikkim trip we had just done, or the Thailand route that actually worked. At some point it seemed sensible to do it properly.
So the desks sit in Siliguri and Bengaluru — one in the hills, one in the south — and between them they cover Kashmir to Kanyakumari and a good part of South East Asia besides. Every route on this site is one we have run, not one we bought from a wholesaler's catalogue.
Not finding your place on the list? That is not a no. Roughly half of what the desks quote in a month never appears on this site at all — a wedding party to Jaipur, a pair of grandparents who wanted Kanyakumari at their own pace, somebody's fortieth in Baku. Name the place and we will plan it.
And because a holiday should not end the moment the flight lands, every journey we plan carries three things at no extra cost — a properly edited reel of your trip, a complimentary hour with a photographer somewhere worth standing, and a list of places to eat that our own drivers and guides go to.
Tell us the place and roughly when. No payment, no call centre, and a planner reads it rather than a form-filling bot.
