Aviral Gupta: Turning backpacking lessons into business leadership at Zostel

Joining Zostel as its first employee and rising to CEO, IIT BHU graduate Aviral Gupta has built his career alongside the growth of the company. Having travelled to 45 countries, he leads one of India’s largest backpacker hostel and budget travel networks where he is turning backpacking lessons into business leadership.

Most of Aviral Gupta’s travels across Europe, the US and Southeast Asia have been solo trips. He slept on beaches, spent time with the homeless, performed at music festivals, volunteered in unknown cities, couch-surfed across dozens of destinations, set up food stalls at camps, even partied in a freezing spa in Budapest at minus 10 degrees.

He also had the harder moments — getting into fights, being mugged, losing his passport, feeling deeply lonely, and longing for home. And yet, he does it again, without a second thought.

Having travelled to 45 countries so far, Aviral’s travel tales are sure to leave anyone wide-eyed in awe. As the CEO of Zostel and its parent company Zo World — one of India’s largest backpacker hostel and budget travel networks — he believes that travel genuinely transforms people. “You leave a part of yourself at every destination you deeply experience and carry a part of it back with you,” smiles Aviral, in conversation with The Global Indian.

Employee to CEO

We have hosted Zostelers from every single country on Earth.

Aviral Gupta

From joining as Zostel’s first employee to becoming its CEO in August 2025, experiences from Aviral’s endless journeys form the very core of his everyday operations at Zostel.

“Everything that I do professionally — managing my teams, how I read people, trust strangers and how I define success, all of it traces back to something experienced on the road,” says Aviral, whose company curates trips across India, Nepal and Southeast Asia.

At Zostel

“For me, it has been a journey with some brilliant highs and devastating lows, but fun all throughout,” smiles Aviral, who started as a project manager in Udaipur, right from the very first Zostels.

He understood ground operations first and eventually wore hats across every single function — from customer experience, sales, marketing, and HR, to product and tech, and now to laying down the vision for Zostel’s next decade.

“Honestly, it never felt like being an employee. There was always a sense of ownership. And it was genuinely challenging because we were establishing an industry that simply did not exist in India at the time.”

In 2013–14, hostels were mostly associated with student housing. “We faced a lot of friction, with many in the industry convinced that the model would not work in India, that solo female travellers would never share spaces with strangers.” The Zostel team, however, believed in the connections that humans form when they travel, and they held on to that. One of the proudest outcomes has been building a brand that has hosted one of the largest numbers of solo female travellers across the country.

We have watched closely how Gen Z and the newer generation travel. There is a genuine network effect where the community itself is expanding the Zostel business model alongside Zo Trips.

Aviral Gupta

Aviral says Team Zostel was always an experimental organisation that encouraged people to bring their own personalities and passions into what they were building.

Responsibility

Stepping into the CEO’s role is a matter of pride, but more than that, it is a responsibility. “The goal is to carry this brand forward, unlock the world for everyone to travel fearlessly, and build a more integrated, tech-first, product-led ecosystem for this community.”

Zostel’s larger base is in India, with decentralised operations running across the country as well as in Southeast Asia, the US, and Europe.

From Prayagraj

Born in Allahabad, now Prayagraj, Aviral spent his entire childhood there, schooling at St. Joseph’s College, one of the oldest convent schools in the city.

He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. “My mother had a PhD in organic chemistry and was actually offered a position at BARC in the late 90s, but chose to stay back to raise me,” recalls Aviral, who grew up as a single child in his grandmother’s home but always had a large circle of cousins around.

The 90s gang

“We were a proper 90s gang, spending entire days outside, playing in parks and streets, breaking things apart just to see how they worked and trying to rebuild them.”

There was one particular instance where Aviral and his friends spent an entire month dismantling a Luna moped with the sole ambition of building a jet plane out of it, inspired by the animated series Swat Kats. “We eventually had to accept that it was not going to happen.”

Backbencher

Academically, he was always a backbencher and, as he puts it, a bit of a headache for his teachers, but consistently ranked in the top three across classes.

“I genuinely enjoyed the variety of subjects. Science, physics, and maths were natural interests, but literature held an equal pull,” says Aviral, who read the classics — David Copperfield, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Pygmalion.

A path that he did not take

Music, dance, football, and cricket were serious childhood ambitions. A lot of his time was spent cycling across the city, then on bikes as he got older, regularly pushing past city limits. “A football match was played almost every day, we bunked classes far more than we should have.”

He trained under Team India cricketer Mohammad Kaif’s brother, who at one point recommended to Aviral’s family that he leave school and pursue cricket full-time as a fielder. “In hindsight, I think that was the right path not taken,” says Aviral, whose friends from those years are still very much a part of his life.

To Varanasi

From Allahabad, Aviral went to IIT BHU, Varanasi, to study chemical engineering — a turning point in his life. “A different sort of freedom opened up and those four years just flew by,” recalls Aviral, who captained the football team, was part of multiple music bands spanning Indian and Western music, and explored various forms of dance.

He would spend a lot of time at the ghats with local people, listening to stories about the history of Varanasi, Indian philosophy, mythology, and spirituality. It was here that his travel journey and a deeper interest in different cultures and outlooks on life really began taking shape. After graduating, he came across Zo World and the kind of work they were doing called out to him immediately.

On the road

Among his many travels was a trip to the US, which turned out to be memorable for different reasons. After visiting around 18 pubs in one night, Aviral realised he had lost his bag, his GoPro, and his passport somewhere along the way.

Similarly, in Paris, he got caught in a strike by the Stop Oil community, missed his train, and ended up hitchhiking all the way to Belgium. That detour took him through the smallest villages in northern France — places he had never heard of — where he encountered both racism and extraordinary warmth from people in the very same destination. “That contrast alone taught me more about culture than any guidebook could.”

“Personally, meeting people from different cultures and understanding how they think about success, love, and relationships forces you to look deeper within yourself,” says Aviral, whose next backpacking destination is South America.

Backpacking

Aviral says the very first challenge during a solo trip is learning to be at peace with your own company and understanding the human need for connection. “You can be silent for a day, two days, three days, but eventually you need a human to talk to. And that is the moment the walls around you come down and the real journey begins.”

Backpacking has to be done on foot, he insists. “Some of my most memorable travels ended simply because my legs could not carry me any further, having walked miles across a city covering every street and every corner.”

Burning Man

For Aviral, the one experience that stands above everything else is Burning Man, the annual, week-long desert event in northwestern Nevada, US focused on community and art.

“At Burning Man, everyone sets aside what they do for work, their title, their income, and what is left is just the human being,” says Aviral, pointing out that the acceptance, the faith across cultures and beliefs, the way connections form in that environment — is unlike anything else.

That experience unconsciously shaped a lot of how he thinks about Zostel and its community. “It is probably why the tagline that came out of us was simply, Live it. Now,” says Aviral, who loves working out of Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Phuket besides India.

The road ahead

For the next five years, Aviral and his team are focused on strengthening their core business, launching new products and destinations, expanding heavily across Southeast Asia, opening at least 100 more destinations in India, and scaling up Zo Trips as a serious business vertical.

We are also unlocking partnerships across different continents by leveraging the Zostel community to find the best places and experiences around the world.

Aviral Gupta

Looking at the Indian market, domestic and outbound tourism are both on an ever-increasing track. He says demand is building in a self-feeding loop, and for him, it comes down to finding the right match of destination, person, and timing. “We will always do it the Zostel way, with gamification, phygital distribution, and the right incentive structure built around the community. That is non-negotiable for us,” says Aviral, who has invested heavily in tech and product to lay the foundation of a community-led platform, which he is planning to launch in the coming months.

Beyond work

Aviral does not have a fixed routine or schedule. A night person since childhood — growing up watching cartoons late at night — he finds himself most creative and productive in the late hours. “Some days it is 18-hour work days, followed by 12 hours of sleep to catch up. Getting out of bed at 3 am because an idea clicked and you just needed to get to the whiteboard — that is a fairly normal occurrence.”

He describes himself as a multi-instrumentalist with diverse taste. “From classical and qawwali to EDM, hard rock, and metal, I love listening to everything.” He plays the guitar, keyboard, and drums, is currently learning to DJ, and loves dancing and playing football.

He follows Formula One closely — not just from a sporting lens but from a business and design engineering perspective. “I do miss my engineering roots and that curiosity never really left. I keep reading up on the latest developments in physics, quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics.” Understanding how the universe works is something he finds endlessly fascinating.

On the entertainment side, he is deeply into anime, with One Piece being an all-time favourite. Gaming is equally important — FIFA, Rocket League, first-person shooters, and the entire Assassin’s Creed saga have all had their moment.

• Follow Aviral Gupta on LinkedIn and Instagram 

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