Shazil Mehkri and the Trouble with a Simple Ticket

Shazil Ali Mehkri has a perfectly serviceable reason to prefer snowy holidays: Karachi supplies quite enough sunshine. It is a small detail, but a useful introduction to a travel entrepreneur whose work involves persuading people to go somewhere else, and whose list of favorite destinations includes coming home.

Mehkri is the co-founder and CEO of Sastaticket.pk, the Pakistani travel booking business he built with his brother, Bilal. His route into entrepreneurship began inside an established travel company. He knew the trade before trying to change the way customers bought it. That background gives his story an interesting tension: how much of a familiar business can you move onto a screen, and how much still requires somebody to pick up the telephone?

A travel desk before a startup

In 2014, Mehkri was signing an agreement at National Bank of Pakistan’s head office in Karachi. He represented Quality Aviation as executive director. The arrangement covered travel services for the bank: fares, confirmed seats, assistance with visas, a travel desk and support around the clock.

It is an unglamorous place to begin a technology story, which makes it rather revealing. Corporate travel depends on arrangements that survive contact with actual travelers. A seat must exist. A booking must be confirmed. Someone must answer when the itinerary becomes inconvenient. A contract like that turns the attractive idea of travel into a list of obligations.

The bank’s account of the agreement emphasized savings and transparent working. Those concerns would travel well into an online business. Buying through a website changes the transaction, but leaves the customer’s practical questions intact: what am I paying, what have I bought, and who will help me use it?

Mehkri had also studied economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with his education listing covering 2005 to 2008. Before the startup years, his professional world already included both an American university and the daily mechanics of Pakistan’s travel industry.

The family business opens another door

Quality Aviation was the family business, started by Mehkri’s father. Shazil and Bilal developed the Sastaticket concept in 2015; operations began in September 2016. The new company addressed consumers booking their own travel, while Quality Aviation’s established work focused on corporate customers.

The obvious question was whether the brothers were setting up competition for themselves. Mehkri’s answer was practical. A consumer platform could reach people the corporate business did not. Some overlap was acceptable if the combined opportunity became larger. Family continuity and a new sales channel could coexist.

He was unusually direct about the advantages this gave him, calling Sastaticket “a very privileged startup.” Existing supplier relationships and organizational support mattered. There is something refreshing about an entrepreneur acknowledging the scaffolding while the building is still going up.

“a very privileged startup”

Shazil Mehkri · 2018

The admission also improves the story. It lets the reader examine the actual decision: an experienced travel operator choosing to build a different route to the customer, with the resources and complications that an existing business brings.

Eleven days in Hangzhou

In March 2018, Mehkri joined a group of 37 Asian entrepreneurs in Hangzhou for Alibaba’s eFounders Initiative, run with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Five participants were from Pakistan. The program offered an 11-day examination of e-commerce and the businesses growing around it.

The curriculum brought entrepreneurs into contact with practitioners and executives to consider which lessons might apply in their own markets. For a founder building a Pakistani booking platform, the question had obvious relevance. A model can travel across a border more easily than the habits of the people expected to use it.

Mehkri’s selection placed him alongside founders working in other parts of Pakistan’s emerging digital economy. The shared subject was broader than tickets: how to make an online platform useful in a market where the surrounding systems are still changing.

It is tempting to treat a program like this as a decorative line in a biography. Here it belongs in the working history: a travel entrepreneur studying commerce at a moment when his own business was moving from launch toward outside investment.

The cheque had a geography

That November, Sastaticket announced a $1.5 million Series A led by Gobi Partners. The announcement came at the 021 Disrupt conference in Pakistan. It was Gobi’s first investment in the country, linking a Karachi booking business with an investor bringing experience from other Asian markets.

The investment supplied capital, but also a comparison. Gobi founding partner Thomas G. Tsao pointed to doubts once raised about China’s cash-based commerce when discussing skepticism about Pakistan. His argument was that experience elsewhere could help explain an opportunity that looked less obvious from a distance.

At the time of the round, reported annual growth was 125 percent in gross merchandise value and 155 percent in orders. The distinction matters: merchandise value describes the value moving through a marketplace, rather than the company’s own revenue. The two figures should keep their proper names.

For Mehkri, the round put an outside investor behind a proposition already being tested by customers. The announced plans included developing the product and expanding services. The next stage would involve making the business more useful, as well as making it bigger.

The founder becomes a mentor

By May 2023, Mehkri was on the mentoring side of another learning exercise. Sastaticket held a hackathon from May 19 to 21, bringing participants together around travel problems. SalamAir, Sadabahar Daewoo Service and Amadeus supported the event as platinum sponsors.

The prizes included internships, job offers and travel vouchers. Mehkri joined mentors from product, technology and travel businesses. Bilal served among the judges, alongside leaders from Sastaticket, PriceOye and Qatar Airways. The gathering put the company’s family roots and its wider industry connections in the same room.

The published challenges were more specific than an invitation to invent the future. They asked teams to address language barriers in booking, notifications about delays and cancellations, missing information about bus travel, and the difficulties of planning journeys with a Pakistani passport.

Those are revealing choices. A booking business can make an attractive demonstration by showing a search box and a payment button. These challenges began with the things that can prevent someone from reaching either one: language, incomplete information and uncertainty about the journey itself.

Trust, with the small print attached

Later in 2023, an essay carrying Mehkri’s author biography set out his view of online travel. It connected trust to concrete practices: protecting personal information, communicating prices and terms clearly, listening to users, and keeping customer support available around the clock.

The argument called trust “a moral obligation.” That is a substantial standard for any booking platform to set itself. It asks the business to consider how a transaction feels to the person making it, particularly when that person is handing over both money and information.

“a moral obligation”

Shazil Mehkri on trust · 2023

Transparency has a wonderfully mundane vocabulary. Prices. Terms. Answers. None looks particularly handsome on a conference stage, yet each can determine whether a customer is comfortable pressing the final button. The essay’s usefulness lies in naming work that a smooth interface might otherwise conceal.

Read alongside his earlier corporate travel responsibilities, the continuity is clear. The delivery mechanism has changed. The obligations remain recognizable. A founder can spend years expanding the product while returning to the same basic promise: the traveler should understand the arrangement and have somewhere to turn.

A million downloads, and the next booking

Sastaticket’s company timeline records the addition of bus ticketing and fintech products in 2021. It places the combined app-download milestone of one million in 2023, followed by more than 1.5 million cumulative tickets booked in its 2024 milestones.

These are company-reported milestones, and each measures something different. Downloads record an app being acquired. Tickets record bookings over time. Neither is a count of people traveling today. Presented with their dates and definitions, they show the distance the platform had covered without requiring the numbers to perform acrobatics.

Mehkri remains listed as chief executive, with Bilal as co-founder. The management team also includes technology, data science and engineering leaders. The work now extends across more kinds of travel than the original flight-and-hotel proposition.

For the person running it, that breadth keeps the central problem alive. Every additional service creates another occasion to earn confidence. A new booking category can bring a new audience, and a new set of questions that somebody inside the company must be prepared to answer.

The holiday without a checklist

Outside the business discussion, Mehkri has described a taste for culture, street food and colder landscapes. In 2019, he recalled an undergraduate camping trip to Kettle Hole Woods. Rain lengthened the trek; burgers and s’mores around the campfire became the meal he remembered.

He also resisted the idea of a prescribed travel bucket list. Kashmir, Norway and the return to Karachi all appeared among his favorites. Iceland was somewhere he hoped to visit at the time.

That last distinction matters in a life built around journeys. An aspiration has its own date; it need not be turned into a completed adventure. The campfire story is enough. A delayed walk, ordinary food and good company can outlast a carefully organized list of sights. Even the CEO of a booking platform has a travel memory whose appeal would be difficult to put into a booking form.