Travel14 min read
The real economics of taking a Uttarakhand homestay online
OTAs make you visible. Your own website makes you profitable. Here's the data — the real costs, the gains, and the honest downsides nobody mentions.
Engineering · Travel · Photography
I run engineering at Racanaa, an energy-tech startup in Bengaluru — the rest is road trips, photographs, and an ancestral home we're reviving in the Almora hills.
I'm Manohar. At an energy-tech startup Racanaa in Bengaluru I look after engineering across the board — the full software lifecycle, data, QA, security, DevOps, product support — and, it being a startup, the IT and infrastructure too: networks, firewalls, keeping the whole thing standing. 'VP, Data & Engineering' is the title on paper; in practice it's all of it. These days I'm playing with AI almost every day to build and test new products. I've been making photographs since 1996 and I'll take any excuse for a road trip. On the side, my wife Roma and I are reviving our ancestral home in the Almora hills as Kunja Village Homestay. My travel and photo journal lives separately at mnegi.com.
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