Travelrf started in Mumbai in 2024 with one conviction: hospitality hiring goes wrong when the person taking the brief is not the person meeting the candidates. We built the firm so those are the same people.
Between us, the founding team spent years inside hotel front offices and airline crew rooms before ever working in recruitment. That order matters. We know what a duty manager means by "she can hold a lobby", and we know that a candidate with a perfect CV and a two-hour commute will be gone by the third month.
When we moved into hiring, the pattern was hard to miss. Hospitality employers were being sent volume: fifty forwarded CVs, no context, nobody spoken to. Meanwhile good candidates were disappearing into portals because nobody had time to call them back. Both sides were badly served by the same gap, and the gap was simply that no one was doing the talking.
So Travelrf does the talking. Every candidate on a shortlist has had a real conversation with one of us. Every client brief is taken face to face or on a proper call, not by email. It is slower, it does not scale beautifully, and it is the entire reason clients come back with a second brief.
We are a team of six in Andheri East. There is no junior layer forwarding CVs on our behalf and no offshore sourcing pool. When a client rings, they reach someone who has read the brief.
Staying small has a cost — we turn down work in months when the calendar is full, and we say no to briefs outside travel, hospitality and aviation even when the fee is good. We think that is the right trade. A firm that recruits for everything recruits well for nothing.
Growth, when it comes, is by lane rather than by headcount. In 2026 that means a US desk: American hospitality and travel brands with operations, properties or partners connected to India, who want the same standard of screening applied on their side. That desk is one person to start with, working remotely in the United States alongside the Mumbai team.
