TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Columbia-based BookingMarkets, a white label accommodation booking system for travel business and vacation rental owners.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
We are a team of 20 world-traveling business gurus and ninja-grade coders based in New York City, Bogota, Santiago, and Lisbon. Some information about the co-founders:
- Alexander Torrenegra – Co-Founder and CEO. Alexander Torrenegra is a serial entrepreneur specialized in online marketplaces. He has co-founded numerous startups, including Torrenegra Labs, Voice123.com, BookingMarkets.com, VoiceBunny.com, LetMeGo.com, and Localo.com among others.
- Leonardo Suarez, Co-Founder and COO. Leonardo Suárez began his career in product development positions in some of the largest plastics and legal publishing companies in Colombia. In 2005 he became part of TorrenegraLabs where as partner he has contributed to the creation, launching and sale of Rentalo.com, Voice123.com, ServerQuo, HubBOG, Localo and LetMeGo.
- Darrell Garbe, Co-Founder and VP of Business Development. Darrell Garbe has worked in marketing and business development for Carnation, Rubin Postaer ad agency, and Consolidated Communications. Darrell was Director of Business Development for InfoSpace.com. Most recently, Darrell has developed and managed resort luxury vacation properties in Colorado, Utah, Illinois, and Florida.
- Paige Brown, Co-Founder and VP of Business Development. Paige Brown spent six years in marketing and strategy for Southwest Airlines, the Coors Brewing Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises, as well as in technology consulting for Accenture. She founded and built Tripeezy, a social travel planning website, from the ground up.
- Andro Lindsay, Co-Founder and VP of Spanish Markets. Andro Lindsay’s previous experience in the corporate world includes direction and management of a variety of departments and projects in companies like Metrogas and LAN Airlines where he took care of project management, finance operation, business process redesign, alliances, etc. Andro holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Federico Santa María and a diploma in Airlines Business Management from the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. He has co-founded travel industry startups including BookingMarkets, LetMeGo and Localo.
- Sérgio Rebelo, Co-Founder and VP of Portuguese Markets. Sérgio Rebelo worked in Software Developer for Siemens and later for Nokia Siemens Networks as a Team Leader and participated in several internal side projects to foster Innovation, Agile methodologies and in the promotion of web based interfaces.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?BookingMarkets has a $2 million angel investment from Torrenegra Labs.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Launching your own accommodation website is very difficult: you need inventory, an audience, and technology. Existing solutions allow you to white-label their inventory, but don’t allow you to also build your own inventory.
We have found that our potential customers also want to target particular geographic or demographic markets with select inventory.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Booking markets is a white-label solution platform for clients interested in creating or marketing a lodgings marketplace online under their personal brand.
We can create custom solutions for any clients from travel entrepreneurs to vacation rental managers to anyone who would like to make commissions from selling travel online.
With BookingMarkets our clients can:
- use the existing inventory of BookingMarkets (which includes the inventory of the major OTAs)
- build their own inventory by developing relationships with hotels, bed & breakfasts, and vacation rentals.
- allow other marketplaces and affiliates of BookingMarkets to book their inventory and share commission with them.
All of our clients can pull and push lodging inventory from the network allowing them to:
- work with a larger inventory database.
- input their own lodgings to create a specialized or niche site for their clients.
Booking Markets technology currently supports multiple consumer facing companies with inventory sourced from multiple partners.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our key customers at launch were travel entrepreneurs and vacation rental managers.
Travel entrepreneurs are looking to launch global booking communities, vacation rental managers are looking for a more flexible option to add booking technology and to achieve better reach for their properties globally.
We have just launched our first successful white-labels and are quickly gaining traction in the market.
Some of our first white-label launches include:
Our white-label engine can by used by:
- Entrepreneurs looking for a technical solution with small initial cost
- Global travel organizations looking to compete internationally (and locally) with OTAs
- Vacation rental managers looking for a flexible booking solution
- Individual vacation property owners looking for cost-effective booking engine
- Travel bloggers looking to supplement their income with commission revenue
- Real estate agents looking to expand into vacation rentals
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?Yes, our initial customers and current white-label partnerships have helped us to validate our platform and plan for future development. Through these partnerships we identified the potential for the BookingMarkets platform.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
BookingMarkets will share commissions with the client for every sale that is made online on any marketplace based on our platform. We also do custom development for more complicated technology projects.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- The BookingMarkets platform has been in operation powering the consumer brands LetMeGo and Localo for the past three years. During that time, the team worked to perfect the technology and create unique features.
Weaknesses:
- We are in the beginning stages of clarifying our product offering and target markets. There are many directions that we could take with the platform so we need to ensure we are exploring the alternatives and making optimal choices with our limited staff and resources.
Opportunities:
- BookingMarkets is offering both an off the shelf solution and more custom solutions with flexibility and customization to allow customers to implement more complicated websites. The platform also allows clients to create and maintain their own relationships with accommodations. There is an opportunity for BookingMarkets as it evolves to possibly become the next GDS.
Threats:
- There are established OTAs that offer custom white-label solutions, but do not have the flexibility and options offered by BookingMarkets. However, these brands carry a large inventory of hotels and a good reputation, making it more difficult to market to potential customers already using these solutions.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Through our many pitches to advisers and potential funding sources, we refined our product offering (and are continuing to do so) based on feedback. We have made mistakes in our pitches, which previously led to negative feedback from one or two individuals.
Overall the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive to BookingMarkets and the potential of the platform.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We will base our success on the following:
- Number of white-label partners
- Amount of bookings from white-label clients based on our platform
- Traffic to our network of white-label sites
- Number of Red Bulls our team consumes
- Number of autographs we give in any given day on the street
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.