JetZet was founded in late 2011 with the mission to make life easier for frequent travelers.
The New York City company allows users to organize plans in one place, manage relationships on the go, and receive automatic updates.
JetZet is focused on the relationship side of business travel, such as by helping you fortuitously meet current friends and business connections at airports or your destination.
Users can create Google Plus-like "circles" for different groups, such as coworkers, family or friends, and instantly decide who to share each trip with. In the words of the company:
"See which connections from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter will be at your destination - you can even find interesting new people on the way."
Then they import trip details stored in their electronic calendars—Outlook, Google, iPhone, iCal—and they can import their contact lists from Web-based email services.
There are millions of people worldwide who travel at least once a month, and this is the market the company focuses on, whether they are business travelers who are managed or unmanaged—or even frequent leisure travelers.
While itinerary management is not the core function of JetZet, on the surface JetZet competes against traditional itinerary management services, such as TripIt, and check-in services, like Foursquare.
However, JetZet's vision focuses on travel and business relationships, which is not a focus of any current company, and may actually be complementary with many companies—even on the itinerary side.
Currently free, JetZet aims to rely on a freemium model, and will plans to make money through the sale of travel products within the itinerary such as hotels, rental cars, even sports tickets.
The core JetZet team includes Nick Farina (CEO), Kiran Patel (CTO), and Joe Razza (Design Director). The company is funded by private investment.
Q&A with CEO Nick Farina:
How is the way you are solving this problem more special or effective than previous attempts you or the market has seen before and how different do you have to be to succeed?
JetZet believes that there are still come legs for 'social travel', but that they will likely be found under the business market, not the leisure market. We are focused on building solutions that bring the itinerary alive for business travelers, connecting people and offering value-added services such as contextualized ExpertFlyer SeatAlerts.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
Relationships are a critical part of business, and even more so for the types of people who travel frequently - typically executives, salespeople, and other such positions.
JetZet allows users to easily see who in their network will be where they are traveling, allows them to easily manage travel sharing (such as sharing trips with certain internal teams) with Circles, and layers on various value-added itinerary services.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
JetZet is a great compliment to OTAs, corporate travel agencies, and many other travel companies.
JetZet's itinerary management system and relationship management platform can enhance the customer experience, and help build brand loyalty by redirecting people back to the original partner platform after the completion of their trip. As such, partnerships are our clearest opportunity for user adoption.
What other options have you considered for the business and the team if the original vision fails?
We have already pivoted slightly, from a pure consumer-facing model (which had a high customer acquisition cost) to an approach more deeply focused on partnerships, which allows us to add value for partners more easily, and reduces our customer acquisition costs.
What mistakes have you made in the past in business and how have you learned from them?
The earlier focus was on social travel more broadly, which is problematic due to the fact that most people only travel once or twice a year.
Our renewed focus on business travel is a result of that learning - we want to create solutions for the people who are traveling the most.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
The user experience in business travel still lags behind consumer travel. This is unfortunate, since business travelers are the ones who are on the road the most.
JetZet's focus on user experience, and social travel with a distinct focus on business, will bring great design to business travel.
Tnooz view:
Startups that go on to great success often don't look very good at the outset.
JetZet doesn't look obviously mistaken at the outset.
Surely business travelers may have pain points they need help with when it comes to juggling relationships while maintaining their brutal travel schedules.
Relationship and business networking management for business travelers is a problem that few others realize is worth solving. The demographic also seems likely to be open to pay for a service that solves their problems effectively.
But JetZet's system still requires too much manual management — through the setting up and maintenance of circles — to be a superior tool to simply emailing contacts to see if they'll be available at your location or posting a status update to, say, LinkedIn.
Business life is about spending half your time trying to contact people who don't want to talk to you, and the other half of your time running away from people you don't want to talk to.
It's not clear that JetZet has built a sophisticated-enough interface to crack that problem, streamlining a way to filter out the people you don't want knowing you're going to be at Osaka Airport tomorrow from the ones you do.
Consider how AwayFind effectively filters out the signal from the noise of business email.
JetZet will soon have integration with ExpertFlyer Seat Alerts. That will add to its usefulness.
But right now, it seems too much like a "sitcom startup idea," something everyone thinks is plausible but no one urgently wants.
There's also a marketing problem here. It's missing a simple, easy-to-communicate story for this product, such as a real-life testimonial from a customer that others can relate to?
Here's hoping this snap critique turns out to be wrong.
Snap poll:
[poll id=" 82"]
NB:TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.