TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring UK-based Distribute Travel, a product distribution platform for travel businesses and white label system for third party websites.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Distribute was set up to enable new distribution opportunities for tour operators and OTAs, and provide businesses breaking into travel with a powerful platform to do this.
Our senior team:
- Nic Costa, managing director - Nic has been instrumental in the development of travel advertising technology products and services since 1997. He was a founder of travel specialist affiliate network, AffiliateFuture and instrumental in building the business to be the fastest-growing affiliate network in the UK with an unrivalled stronghold in the travel sector when it was sold in 2007.
- Giles Parnwell, commercial director - Giles is a well-respected travel industry figure, having won personal and company awards for services to the travel industry. He started at Singapore Airlines 20 years ago, responsible for UK sales and driving a number of online firsts in online advertising and marketing for the airline. He has extensive knowledge of affiliate marketing and travel technology, and proven commercial experience at managing business portfolio’s exceeding £180 million per year.
- Daniel Chick, technical director - Like Nic, Dan was with AffiliateFuture from the start and was the technical force behind its award-winning technology. Since selling the business in 2007 Dan has taken an advisory role for many big names in the industry. He has a strong background in all aspects of Internet related technology, with specific expertise in scalable web application infrastructure, online advertising, tracking technology, API development and ‘Cloud’ based computing architectures.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?We’re self-funded so far.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We’re helping to create new high-volume distribution opportunities for tour operators and OTAs and providing complimentary brands with new revenue streams from travel without any technical resource requirements.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Distribute’s technology aggregates live data from a wide range of big name travel suppliers for syndication to high-profile web sites looking to promote holidays. The flexibility and open nature of the product uniquely allows any brand to deliver live pricing into websites, email or specialised marketing campaigns such as retargeted banner advertising.
We publish white label holiday search websites for complimentary brands, such as web portals, tourist boards, and price comparison sites.
Customers can be directed at live results pages in many ways:
- Via a colour customisable search box. We provide simple tools to do this
- Via a holiday search website homepage
- Via links within website text, email, banner ads, Google PPC ads to specific results pages, eg.
- Holidays from East Midlands Airports to the Canary Islands leaving in the next 6 weeks
- All inclusive holidays from London to Kos for 2 adults and 2 children next summer
The underlying high-capacity holiday price and availability data is also fed direct to existing leading travel aggregators and specialist advertising and marketing agencies for use in their own products and services.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
- Travel suppliers: Thomas Cook, Lowcost Group, On Holiday Group, On The Beach, Expedia
- Travel aggregators: TravelSupermarket, Teletext Holidays
- Agencies: Struq & Flashtalking (retargeting), Rocketer (social), Fusepump (affiliate feeds & tools)
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?We presented the first version of our white label technology to Thomas Cook five months ago. They were clearly impressed, and suggested a use for it that we hadn’t thought of; on the late deals section of their own website. They carried out split tests to validate the technology, and found that conversions significantly increased. We couldn’t have asked for a better test case.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) with monthly licensing fees dependent on volumes. Our strategy is simply to sign up more partner websites to increase our distribution network and revenues for all parties. In 2012 we’ll be adding flights, hotels, dynamic packages, car hire, and travel extras.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- The technology is extremely complex and volumes of data are huge. Our team have obsessed about travel distribution for years and have worked with most of the parties involved on the supply side with different hats on.
- We’re specialised in travel, and our technology has been designed from the outset to deal with the volatility in pricing and live availability specific to the travel sector.
- Having access to new cloud technology products in development before they are launched
Weaknesses:
- It can often take our suppliers months to track down the source of their data, or it may be tied into other distribution systems.
Opportunities:
- Substantial new distribution opportunities for our travel suppliers
- A hungry set of clients that are keen top showcase their product in new areas online
- High traffic websites that are keen to offer travel products to their visitors
Threats:
- Other players coming to market, but as we’re already working with the big players, and there is so much development work involved, we’re at a distinct advantage
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?We’ve only had encouragement so far.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
- Substantial levels of targeted visitors delivered to our travel clients’ websites via our technology.
- Providing a genuinely simpler, more useful way for travellers to compare holidays, flights, and hotels.
- Creating a new revenue stream for many large players keen to break into travel.
- Expansion into other countries.
NB:Here is a Prezi overview.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.