Immersive Trails

Immersive Trails is a purpose-driven company focused on making culture and heritage accessible for travelers and locals alike. It was founded in 2017 by Chelsea McGill and me under the name Heritage Walk Calcutta with the goal of using our research skills in anthropology and archaeology to curate experiences on Kolkata and the surrounding region. Each of our experiences is the product of sustained, in-depth research by trained and experienced scholars, and is therefore highly accurate. At Immersive Trails, we challenge the conventional travel trends of either taking visitors to the "top 10" sites for quick sightseeing, or focusing a voyeuristic lens on local communities that only confirms the stereotypical ideas of places and cultures. Instead, we deeply believe that tourism can be ethical and enriching for both travelers and the local communities. We ensure this by working closely with the members of local communities throughout the process of developing and curating our unique experiences. This provides visitors with more immersive, empathic cultural insights into places and local traditions, while at the same time benefiting the local community both economically and socially. In the three years leading up to the pandemic we conducted more than 500 in-person experiences and built a loyal following of explorers to become the market leader of the cultural experiences sector in the Indian state of West Bengal. Before the pandemic we also had a year-on-year revenue increase of 100% and reported a profit each year. The COVID19 pandemic gave us an opportunity to take our experiences online, and open them up to a global audience. Between July 2020 and the end of June 2021, we conducted 110 virtual experiences that were attended by 1522 participants joining from 137 cities and 32 countries. Our pivot to a virtual platform has attracted a global loyal following and helped us sustain through the COVID19 pandemic. Keeping our global ambitions in the post-COVID world of travel in mind, in September 2020 we rebranded from Heritage Walk Calcutta to Immersive Trails. We are now looking for investment and incubation to expand our global reach using a virtual medium. Our virtual experiences have demonstrated that we can continue our cultural and heritage outreach through curating experiences that are not limited by physical boundaries while at the same time sustaining as a for-profit company. In the next 5 years, we want to become the leading ethical and immersive virtual experience curator in the global market. We want to do this by using cutting-edge technology to create a permanent virtual experiences platform and diversify our offerings in collaboration with members of local communities worldwide. In doing so, we intend to help build resilience and self-sufficiency in the Post-COVID tourism sector. We envisage our virtual experiences to be accessible to both travelers and those who cannot travel. Apart from our web-based virtual experiences platform, we also want to create a separate app-based platform through which travelers can access unique and insightful cultural experiences when they travel while keeping safe, informed, and staying away from crowds.