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A curator for every journey. Real people, not scripts.
Not a transaction, not a package. A small, slow, remembered exchange between people who live somewhere and people passing through.
“The most meaningful travel begins when you stop seeing a place as a tourist attraction and start seeing it as someone’s home.”
Trocals began when our founder, Ritik, started seeing familiar places with unfamiliar eyes. In 2018, while travelling to Mumbai for an interview, he experienced the excitement of exploring a city as a traveller. But it was during a gap year in early 2019, while wandering through the streets of his own hometown of Agra, that something changed.
Beyond the postcards and monuments, he discovered hidden alleys, untold stories, local artists, conversations, and a city he felt he had never truly known before. That realisation stayed with him: if someone could rediscover their own hometown this way, perhaps travel had been reduced to checklists for too long.
Trocals was started as an experiment — to create authentic walking experiences where people could connect with places through stories and the people who lived them.
A trip for an interview unexpectedly introduces Ritik to the joy of experiencing a city as a traveller.
Trocals launches with unique walking experiences designed around storytelling and local perspectives. By July, it becomes one of Agra’s leading walking tour experiences.
As the world pauses during COVID-19, Trocals adapts through virtual experiences and expands its focus to Indian travellers.
We believe that the tourism industry has a problem with people. It moves them efficiently from monument to monument, feeds them at restaurants that exist only because tourists do, and sends them home with photographs of places they never really entered. The locals in these pictures are scenery. The culture is a backdrop.
We believe that travel should disturb you slightly. Not in the way of danger, but in the way of expansion. The meal that makes you question your own cooking. The conversation that reveals an assumption you didn’t know you had. The street that is so alive it makes your own city feel thin by comparison.
We believe that the people who live somewhere know it better than any guidebook, aggregator, or algorithm. And that their knowledge is not a commodity — it is a relationship. One that must be entered with care, curiosity, and genuine respect.
We believe that sustainable tourism is not a feature. It is the premise. A travel company that does not improve the lives of the communities it enters is not a travel company. It is an extraction operation.
Trocals exists to prove that travel can be the most humanising thing a person does. That it can shrink the distance between two strangers. That a city you’ve never been to can feel, after 2.5 hours with the right person, like a place you belong.
Every decision at Trocals — who we partner with, how we price, which destinations we add — is measured against these four words. They are not marketing language. They are operating principles.
A curator for every journey. Real people, not scripts.
A light footprint. Where we go we leave better than we found.
Festivals, rituals, the way India looks after itself.
Stay curious. Stay slow. Stay long enough to be surprised.
Before Trocals, Ritik was simply someone obsessed with stories.
Long before there was a company, there was curiosity. He was the person who wanted to know what existed beyond the obvious — beyond monuments, beyond itineraries, beyond the places people said you ‘had’ to visit. Travel was never just about destinations for him; it was about understanding people.
In 2018, while travelling to Mumbai for an interview, he experienced the excitement of discovering a city through the eyes of a traveller. But the moment that changed everything happened closer to home.
During a gap year in early 2019, Ritik began exploring his hometown of Agra. Not the Agra from postcards and guidebooks, but the Agra hidden in conversations, old neighbourhoods, food stalls, forgotten stories, and everyday life. He found himself falling in love with a city he thought he already knew.
That experience stayed with him.
If someone could rediscover their own hometown with fresh eyes, how many travellers were leaving with only half the story?
What started as an experiment became Trocals — a way to build experiences around the belief that the most meaningful parts of travel are often the ones that cannot be booked, photographed, or rushed.
Today, Ritik continues to build Trocals around the same instinct that started it all: finding people with stories worth sharing. Not just guides, but storytellers, artists, locals, and culture keepers who help travellers experience a place from the inside out.
Because for him, travel was never about showing people a destination.
It was always about helping them feel it.
The person behind Trocals — personally vets every curator, and refuses to add a destination he hasn’t experienced himself.
Our curators are not employees and not contractors. They are partners. They set their own prices, choose which experiences they offer, and own their relationship with every traveller they meet. Trocals is the bridge. They are the destination.
Every booking is a data point in a larger story — of money staying local, of traditions being preserved, of two strangers becoming something closer to friends.
Over 340 artisan families — block printers, weavers, potters, calligraphers — now earn a regular supplementary income through Trocals tours. In Sanganer alone, five families have been able to keep their workshops open solely because of the visitors we send.
Launched during COVID-19, the Curator Support Fund has disbursed ₹42 lakhs to curators and their families during periods when tours were suspended. The fund is now permanent, financed by 2% of every booking.
The travel industry extracts. It takes the beauty of a place, commodifies it, and rarely returns the value to the people who made that beauty possible in the first place. We are building the opposite model — one that is honest about its impact and structured to improve it.
This is not green-washing. It is not a checkbox. It is the original premise of Trocals: that the communities we enter should be measurably better for our presence. Every year, we publish a Transparency Report with exact figures. Every year, it must improve.
We never book hotel chains. Every stay is a family-run heritage property, farmhouse, or community-owned guesthouse.
All food on our experiences is sourced from local kitchens and family homes. No restaurant menus unless it's a family establishment.
A minimum of 15% of every booking goes into a community fund for the destination visited. Audited annually and published publicly.
2% of every booking funds school fees for curators' children. 47 children supported in the last academic year.
Trocals has a strict policy against any experience involving animal riding, performing animals, or facilities that cause animal stress. Zero exceptions.
Whether you want to travel with us, share your home with our guests, or simply believe in what we’re building — there is a place for you here.
The idea grows beyond Agra, bringing local storytellers and immersive experiences to multiple destinations across India.
Trocals works with local artists, storytellers, and communities to create experiences that go beyond sightseeing — building travel that is authentic, meaningful, and rooted in people.
Trocals continues to grow slowly and intentionally, creating experiences where travellers don’t simply visit a destination — they connect with it.
Since 2022, Trocals has offset 100% of the transport carbon generated by our ground journeys through partnerships with verified Indian forest restoration projects. Our walking tours are, of course, already net zero.
By 2030, Trocals will direct ₹10 crore into artisan community development across India, support 500 active curator families, achieve full carbon neutrality across all multi-day tours, and ensure that every destination we operate in has a documented community benefit framework in place.