Roadtrips are an age-old American tradition, symbolizing the freedom and promise that the automobile brought especially to the United States.
Even today, as average number of miles driven has dropped, drive markets form a significant portion of the tourism economy in the US. According to the US Travel Association the US drive market represents 85% of the one billion overnight trips taken in the nation - a lucrative opportunity for tools and services geared towards making these trips easier and more fun for travelers.
Roadtrippers is a utility that allows vehicle-based travelers to plan a detailed itinerary, a sort of trip planning service based on the cultural finds, culinary discoveries, and overnight accommodations that drive any good road trip.
The team of 9 includes James Fisher (CEO and Co-Founder), Tatiana Parent, (Content and Community), John Lauck, (Co-founder and Lead Developer), and Chelsea Koglmeier (Business Development).
When asked about market size, Chelsea Koglmeier responded:
78% of U.S. travel and tourism spend is spent by people on road trips. So I’ll simply say large!
The tool itself is a visually-engaging and wholly-immersive experience, providing a robust selection of things to do, places to stay and a variety of other cultural and culinary activities around the US.
It's a mapped mash-up of a trip planning tool, one that has eluded road travelers to date. Previously relegated to a clumsy back-and-forth between a mapping site with various listings, and a preferred trip planning site, roadtrippers can now access a full map with listings that can be saved for later into a fully-usable trip plan.
The interface is elegant-but-useful, and the concept itself is scalable to other countries that have significant road-based tourism: Australia comes immediately to mind.
Plan a Trip, Find Places, Guides, and Blogs identify the navigation pillars, and show a clear-cut, thoughtful content strategy that instantly brings both custom planning and inspiration tools to new users.
Developing a community should be straightforward, given the novelty and painpoint of the service.
Businesses will also be interested in capturing some passing tourist dollars, providing a new way to get customers that doesn't necessarily impact their other means of marketing. For example, promotions directed explicitly at drive-through travelers might be more appealing than the risk of local discounting on perceived brand value.
Read on for the Tnooz interview with the Roadtrippers team.
What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
We are building a set of products for destinations, tourism departments and travel blogs/brands. The core platform and API can power white label trip planners, local area guide apps, and highly specific travel analytics. Expect some big announcements this summer!
At scale we can work in local ads/premium listings, and bookings. However we wont just ‘throw in’ a booking button. We have to rebuild the way booking works for road travel from a UI perspective, thus it’s a future project.
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
We were living overseas and would regularly visit the US and take long road trips.
I became frustrated by the prevalence of generic chains in many areas, but found there was almost always something interesting hidden away nearby. I wanted to help them rise to the surface. I also found it strange that I was using about 10 websites and tools while travelling. Seemed obvious that it should all be in one interface.
Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
The only travel site for road based travel and tourism. Combines mapping, travel guides and gps functionality into one interface that syncs across web and mobile. Built for the majority of Americans for whom cars (or bikes, rv’s etc) are the primary mode of transport for leisure travel.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
To save time planning, to travel via independent places and escape the chains, for a fun engaging user experience.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
We put the product and UX first and foremost. We aim to create a great experience that is highly shareable. We have a huge content and search strategy kicking in, and we have a lot of embeddable tools for third party sites planned. We currently grow 30% month-over-month organically.
How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?
Our original idea is what you see today. Very little has changed. We are really only 10% of the way into the vision. We did not build this because we wanted to “do a startup”, we built it because we are travellers and we wanted this tool.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
We aim to be the go-to travel platform for road based travel and tourism. To get there we will have a lot of design challenges to overcome within that timeframe, as we plan to pack a lot of functionality into a neat, unified interface.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
For road travel: The tools travellers use are fragmented and do not sync together - place discovery, mapping, booking, navigation etc. It’s a messy experience!
Tnooz take:
Road trips are often difficult to plan, jumping around different services to try to find the best deals, most interesting places, or general help in determining direction. It's not a fun process, and no easy-to-use, attractive tools using Web 2.0 practices and mobile technology have been specifically designed for the road trip use case.
The ability to discover fun and interesting things to do on the road is as old as the road trip itself, with countless travel books dedicated to different routes across the US. Printing out maps, using navigation apps, or a mish-mash of the aforementioned tools were the only way to go.
In addition, the focus on the map - rather than a Pinterest-inspired "Discover" feature - retains the original spirit of the planning process. It is a road trip after all, and seeing each category laid out on a map is vital for that excitement.
This new tool will likely see rapid uptake in the mobile-savvy target audience that's gearing up for the summer season of epic road trips. The team is on solid footing, and will surely be gobbled up fast by a larger company eager for talent, interface and scale. Mapquest, are you listening? Or perhaps a TripAdvisor linkup, to seed reviews in the results?
Immediate challenges include scaling the number of listings, and continuing to aggressively develop road trip-related content that brings inbound traffic and inspires actual roadtrippers to plan their trips. Following that, the mobile product must deliver a useful experience so travelers continue to use the product while on the road, allowing for both organic and paid engagement opportunities for listed businesses.
The potential is most certainly there, and the seeds of a transformative product have already been sown.