Live My Journey connects travellers with locals through social trip planner

TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based Live My Journey, a social media-led planning service connecting travellers with locals.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Live My Journey is a social travel planning website to help you plan and organize your trip.

By using various social media/networking tools, curated travel content, and user-generated content, we provide the user with results such as user recommendations, events, articles, blogs, photos and Q&A with locals; all for their destination, all on one page.

Each piece of content can be added to a travel planner to create and organize his or her own travel experience.

Users can also add their friends or other travelers to their travel planner and collaborate with them to plan the perfect trip.

Amit Wadhawan (founder) has traveled extensively including backpacking through Europe, traveling to South America and Asia, all of North America and living on and between both coasts of the United States.

With a background in finance and work experience in banking, he also started a successful online e-commerce business after college.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Self-funded.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Travel Planning is still painful and extremely time consuming. Websites often focus on providing a user just flight and hotel booking tools but don't provide the user with what to do at their destination.

Every industry/sector has advanced and evolved, yet the travel industry still remains stagnant with little innovation. All you see are new ways to book trips… And not ways to make them memorable.

Travel websites like Travelocity, Expedia and Kayak call themselves "travel-planning" websites, however, they provide no information about what to do once you arrive at your destination.

TripAdvisor is great for finding out which hotel to stay at, but then what?

There is so much travel content out there that is distributed over hundreds of websites and it’s exhausting to browse through dozens of websites for hours just to find out what’s worth doing or avoiding at your destination.

Once you’re done bookmarking dozens of pages, you open up an excel file and start making your daily itinerary. Then there’s the emailing, texting or calling back and forth in order to coordinate with your fellow travelers. Organizing all the content after you’ve found it is hard and not efficient.

Guidebooks are out-dated, expensive and often only show you the most common or popular sites.

They do not provide information that allows travelers to have an authentic and unique experience at their destination.

None of this is easy, efficient or fun!

Every time I travel, I encounter these problems and spend hours in front of a computer just to figure out how to make my trip awesome. Then trying to organize all my findings and having access to them when I’m on the move is another pain that is unnecessary.

Describe the business, core products and services?

The core of the website is the interactive and easy to use travel planner. Also, providing curated and relevant content to help make the user’s trip customizable and memorable is a very important feature.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Before the official launch and during our beta phase, we’re aiming to focus on frequent/seasoned travelers and early adopters to build a strong community of users who can help us iterate and make the website fulfil it’s mission of making travel planning as easy as possible through feedback.

At launch, we will focus on all people looking to plan trips within the coming months as well as people returning from trips to share their experiences with other travelers.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes. We’ve had customers look at the product and endorse the idea as well as the process of travel planning on Live My Journey.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

The revenue stream will consist of the following:

CPC from checking rates of flights and hotels that have been integrated into the travel planner and search.
Sponsored content from travel providers.
CPM from banner ads.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

Total focus on user experience and acquiring relevant travel content.
An online travel planner that's not like any other in the travel industry and is completely focused on ease of use and collaboration with friends.
Curated and relevant travel content for destinations.
Ability to quickly adapt to consumer needs because of a lean startup model.

Weaknesses:

Lack of user-generated content in beginning stages.
Travel content database is limited.
Lack of brand recognition will make the acquisition of users hard in the beginning.
Lack of financial resources might slow growth of user base and travel content.

Opportunities:

Using an affiliate or our own flight and hotel booking system will boost revenue exponentially.
Sharing experiences is becoming popular among users, which helps in creating an extensive user-generated database and sharing on other social media websites.
The immense size of the travel market and more travelers looking for more unique experiences on their trips.
Lack of innovation in the travel planning industry with only a handful of other startups focusing will make entry easier.
Building partnerships with travel content providers to acquire a bigger and better database for users to have access to.
Ease into tour operators using the travel planner as a marketing tool.

Threats:

If one of the big OTAs or established online travel websites simulate our travel planning process.
Other startups in the travel planning industry gain significantly more traction and over-shadow features provided by our website.
Any existing content or database partners pull out.

Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?

The response for this website has been overwhelmingly positive. None have advised against the idea so far although we have received advise on how startups fail and what pitfalls to avoid.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Membership growth! The more members we have, the more we can learn from them and build the tools and features they want most.

Twelve months from now, our success metric would be to sustain at least a 20-25% month-to-month growth rate in registered users (reaching at least 300,000 registered users) that will help us get extensive travel data for our favourite travel moments, photos and blogs section.

Here is obligatory cute video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFzWIr1FjXM