Tour guides are often offline affairs, a relationship that is sought once on the ground. Mostly this has been due to the minimal online presence of a profession driven by face-to-face connections and relationships with traditional travel agents. Services that give tour guides an online platform are becoming more popular, especially as collaborative consumption liberates non-traditional revenue streams for many locals.
A new startup called Guidexplorer is tackling this challenge by creating space for both guides to sell their services and travelers to secure services directly.
Co-founder Tarek Habib sees this direct connection as essential to travel:
We want to put the human factor at the center of the travel industry. All of the team members love travelling and playing this central role of bringing people together is very rewarding to all of us.
The problem that Guidexplorer solves is to provide additional visibility for the tour guides, and enable travellers to have the best custom made trips.
Our near to medium term vision is to establish Guidexplorer as a company in this market area, hopefully bringing in a team of 6 full time team members to work on it within 3 years.
The 3-person team, which has self-funded to date, answered the Tnooz Q&A.
What is the genesis story for this business - why did you start it?
Concerning the decision to create the business it was mainly related to our personal background, for instance the first ‘idea launcher’ is Tarek Habib who founded Guidexplorer and is a double national from Egypt and France. As most of the people know, following the Arab spring and the revolution in Egypt the tourism sector got hit, badly.
Having a number of travel professionals in our direct entourage, we thought about this business idea and decided to put this website online with the main goal of putting professional tour guides in direct contact with travellers.
We believe that this direct contact will provide travellers with more accurate and valuable information that will add significant added value to their travels. And in the mean time it opens new communication channels for the tour guides who then broaden their network, thus increasing the possibility of meeting new customers.
The decision was thus mainly to try to put the human factor at the centre of the travel industry. The JUMP was thus decided since we like travelling A LOT, we know very good travel professionals and all of the team wants to live by playing this role (i.e. centring travel around human interactions).
What is your estimation of current market size?
We have estimated the current size of the market of traveller-to-personal tour guide business to 150 millions Euros (across different channels, in our estimation only 10% passes online). From our studies, this market is in full expansion and is likely to double over the next 3 years.
Our objective is to get to 0.1% of this market by the end of 2014 (=~150kEuros).
How do you see your current competitive landscape?
Competition is quite hard especially for new comers. Now the advantage is that the number of active websites is still limited (less than 10 websites). The main difficulty for a new comer is to compete with other websites that are backed by large multinationals (I will not cite names as we do not want to add advertisement to them even her J)
What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our website is ad-free. This decision was done at the early stages of the project since we really want the focus to be only on the tour guides without colourful banners everywhere. All the functions on the website are also free for both travellers and tour guides. The revenue is quite simple, the website takes 10% at the booking of a tour that is published on it.
By putting in place a ‘review and recommendation’ system, we believe that tour guides will actually incite travellers to book through Guidexplorer. A tour guide or business that is recommended by other travellers has 80 times more chances of being booked again than other competing tour guides.
Please describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
Our company’s goal is to put the human factor at the centre of the travel industry. We do not pretend to revolution the world by our website, but our business strategy is focused on this and should bring in an additional piece, in the future and in addition to the website, that enforces this statement.
For the moment there are two or three websites that propose the same service as Guidexplorer. However, with increasing business flow, Guidexplorer will be definitely differentiated from other websites.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
Everybody should use our services because they are coherent, focused and efficient. We have put a lot of effort to keep all the processes as simple as possible. The website is ad-free (i.e. focus), the communication is simple (i.e. efficient), and the business case is clear (i.e. coherent).
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
Our strategy on one side, the tour guide side, is to build a solid relationship with our tour guides. They are at the heart of the Guidexplorer. We would like our tour guides to be our business ambassadors since we work all together for the same goal and that is, more human interaction and add significant value to any travel experience.
On the travellers’ side, we conduct regular marketing campaigns to increase awareness and spread the word. These marketing campaigns are conducted on the regular communication channels (google ads, facebook, twitter).
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?
The initial idea was to simply propose a web directory for tour guides from all over the world, offering premium functionalities to specific tour guides who subscribe to the website. We then decided to make everything free for both the travellers and the tour guides and thus we made changes to our original business plan, by enabling tour guides to publish tour offers on our platform.
Honestly, we didn’t set other options if this vision fails, so we hope that it will succeed!
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
In 3 years time we wish that the online platform will be well established, used and known by a large number of users (travellers and tour guides alike) and that our offline activities (that should start by Q2 2014) would have started correctly and met with success.
Our plan is to grow to a team of 6 persons working fulltime on Guidexplorer by end of 2015.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Nothing’s wrong with the available offerings, we are just aiming to bring a fresh vision to the industry where communication and interactions between human beings from different cultures is key. We want the global travel industry to help in increasing the intercultural understanding and help breaking stereotypes by providing unique and rich experiences to both travellers and tourism professionals.
Tnooz view:
Like any community-based business that connects one party to another, trust is paramount for success. The team needs to ensure that guides are vetted and rated to the greatest extent possible. This will preserve the traveler's experience, and make it much more likely that positive word-of-mouth will fuel growth.
On the flip side, the potential for magnification of bad experiences with tour guides is great. The team needs to be especially careful to have systems in place to deal with complaints - the traveler experience with their chosen guides should be placed at the center of the company.
Another large challenge will be funding to fuel scale. Whichever one of the competitors in this space, such as AnyRoad, is able to scale quickest as far as both users and guides (because you need both enough guides to appeal to users and users to attract guides), will win. Users may be willing to check out multiple sites for the best guides, but guides are not likely to successfully maintain pages across multiple platforms.
By focusing on the quality of guides, and developing a solid content marketing strategy that attracts travelers, the company could position itself for success. Other options include developing partnerships with other organizations/travel businesses that might benefit from the online aggregation of guide options.