About

XTE started as a passion project for three of us – Akshay Kotecha, Saransh Agarwal and Ismail Lakdawala. The three of us met each other at Christ Univerity, Bengaluru in 2014. We are the best of friends who love taking adventures, and being in nature amidst the great outdoors. And so on our student budgets, we started travelling to all the places we got a chance to visit on our holidays. During this period around 2016, we started with a basic WordPress blog and started to document basic itineraries with vital on-ground information about places which we used to visit.

Why XTE started?

After our graduation, 3 of us took our separate paths and started our corporate journeys. During this time as well, we kept on travelling on every holiday we would get. And in 2019, we felt we could put our heads together and address the problem that we were facing while planning all of our trips. The problem – of lack of genuine, reliable and first-hand travel information on the internet, especially about the destinations which are not too popular or mainstream, and more so in our country – India.

With this as the Core of XTE, we decided to quit our jobs, put all our savings together and try and monetise the venture so we can help travellers like us.

We started collecting itineraries from friends, and families and documented their experiences as blogs on our website. Made them search-friendly, and started creating a database. 

We then leveraged this momentum we received from our viewers to launch X-Trips. We used to organise a one-of-a-kind curated Xperience to some of our favourite, less popular destinations. We took a limited number of people, not more than 15 on these short Xcursions, XTE style. 

COVID!
We had just picked up good momentum when Covid-19 hit the world at the start of 2020.

Since then, we pivoted to making videos and sharing information with our viewers through straight-to-the-point, well-produced videos.

It took a while to get a hang of the entire process, from writing retention-worthy content to shooting and learning to edit high-quality videos. But we made the most of the lockdown getting our skills sorted to make more content!

Unfortunately, after COVID-19, Akshay had to take a step back and take a new direction in life, so he was not able to continue further with XTE.

Where is XTE Now?

At the start of 2023, Saransh & I (Ismail) shifted to Bengaluru and we have set up a studio space in our apartment to keep creating a constant flow of content from all our travels.

We are growing our team and working with Video Editors to create more efficiently now. 

We plan to continue writing more blogs, create informative videos, document our adventures in vlogs and create a community of like-minded travellers. If you would like to publish your blogs, travels and articles, would be happy to host your content as a guest post on our website! Feel free to contact us for any other ideas, collabs or a short chat.

Mail us at [email protected]

What’s Next?

We have set up our store where you can buy our Xclusive merch and digital guidebooks from,
And, We will be launching our X-Trips very soon with a bigger better and more curated Xperience for our entire community! Stay in touch, and drop your emails to be notified when we launch them below!

– Ismail