STARTUP STAGE: SeeVoov drives travel bookings through tagged videos

SeeVoov

SeeVoov video tagging technology helps travelers select destinations, accommodations and activities. 

SeeVoov currently has affiliations with Skyscanner and Booking.com to manage flight and accommodation reservations. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

SeeVoov offers an intuitive, social, video-based trip planner. This is an all-new trip-planning concept. Instead of reading material on your destination, you can watch videos that are previously tagged by our system. Once you see a point of interest that you wish to visit, you just add this point of interest (POI) to your trip plan.

When you finish the POIs selection, the system plans the best route for your trip and then enables you to book your flights, hotels and other reservations. SeeVoov technology is based on an intelligent machine learning system (under patent registration) that automatically tags videos based on image recognition algorithms.

What inspired you to create this company?

We all love to travel, and it usually takes a lot of planning. We thought of a nicer and time-saving solution for trip planners and saw an article regarding the growing role of video for travel and then it hit us: Video is now 70% of online traffic, and in 2016 there were 49 billion views in YouTube in travel-related videos, and 64% of views came from travelers that were planning and preparing their trip.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: Automated video-tagging platform (under patent registration) that automatically tags points of interest in videos; scalable; small team; very good beta testing results (25,000 users, 5:51 minutes average stay in the site, 6.21 pages in the site from all around the world without any marketing).

• Weaknesses: At this stage, our dependency on YouTube as a major source of videos. We need to change behavior of trip planners, and this can be a hard task.

• Opportunities: Travelers are looking at videos today as part of their trip planning. We offer them a comprehensive, A to Z solution for inspiration, planning and traveling. Travel companies are looking for ways to attract their customers and to increase their loyalty and increase their revenues.

• Threats: Crowded industry; other trip planners that might start using videos; possible new copyright regulations or embedment policy in YouTube or any other source of video.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

From the travelers’ side, we save time and offer a nice way to plan your trip for the traveler and partners. For the industry, we offer a tool that can better serve their customers when planning their stay and can increase their revenues with our affiliation model.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We are offering three models that we currently work with. The first is B2B for C with online travel agencies, airline companies, hotels, etc. (as a white label solution). The second is B2G with cities and travel-related governmental agencies, and the third is direct B2C.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market. 

There are several trip planners that are already attracting millions of travelers, but none of those sites are working with videos. When we add this to the fact that there were 49 billion views in YouTube on travel-related videos, we understand that there is a market for video-based trip planning. 

How and when will you make money?

I hope that we will start generating revenues within a year through application downloads and trip sync, affiliation that we currently have with Skyscanner and Booking.com, location-based coupons and advertising in our site.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

We both came after several years in tech development and entrepreneurship, and for both of us this is not the first startup that we have. When we started two years ago, we had no experience in the travel industry (only the fact that we love traveling), and as time went by we got more and more involved in the local and international travel community. We participated in major conferences in the field of tourism, and we get great feedback from the industry.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

The most difficult part was capital raising, although we had many technological obstacles as well.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We just finished our beta, and now it is the time to see if our direction is the right one. We had 25,000 users in our beta testing, and the feedback is great (both from users and partners). We have started implementing our system with several OTAs and airlines, and we believe that once we're well-marketed, this way of trip planning can go viral.