STARTUP STAGE: Strabe wants to streamline business travel

Strabe

Strabe is intended to help corporate agents streamline the booking and travel process for their clients. 

Founded in 2017, the platform went live in private beta from September to December 2018, and starting this month, it is in open beta.  

 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Strabe is the new and better way to onboard, engage and delight corporate clients. We’ve built a platform that enables travel agencies to provide truly seamless business travel services to corporate clients. It is the ultimate productivity software for travel agencies, travel agents and consultants serving corporate clients as they can manage the entire travel planning process on the platform without requiring too much involvement on the traveler side.

With Strabe, travel agents can receive trip requests immediately as soon as the trip is created, enabling them to be proactive and save tremendous time during the booking process (no more email threads, phone calls, meetings or text messages to book trips). As David Elm, the Travel Group‘s president said, “The ability to keep ALL communication for a specific trip organized in one platform and in one file is a big deal.”

In short, the software gives travel agencies the ability to onboard corporate clients online, receive automated travel requests in real time and proactively book travel plans with minimal exchange; hence providing a seamless business travel experience to corporate clients by erasing the planning aspect of travel.

What inspired you to create this company?

We were looking for a truly seamless business travel solution in our previous positions and couldn’t find one despite all the catchy taglines. We’ve realized that the entire corporate travel ecosystem assumed that travelers are in the business of travel and therefore wanting to manage trips themselves. So business travel technologies focus on self‐serve tools that travelers can use to book trips themselves.

We believe that business travelers are not in the business of travel. They rely on the travel ecosystem to get them from point A to B, the same way I rely on my bank card to wire the money to the right merchant after a purchase.

Expecting corporate travelers to do the heavy lifting during the travel planning process adds nothing but friction. We believe that seamless business travel is like magic, where everything happens in the background and my role as a traveler is to just show up. That insight is the inspiration behind our product and everything we do at Strabe. We’re on a mission to bring seamless business travel to every corporate traveler. 

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

• Strengths – Speed of execution is our biggest strengths. In the past six months, we’ve shipped more than eight features, and there’s still more to come. We are able to improve our product as we gather feedback from travel agents and travelers.
• Weaknesses – Strabe is not currently integrated with other key platforms involved in business travel: expense, accounting, CRM, health tracking apps and more. The decision to not integrate from the start is strategic; we are focusing on mastering the seamless business travel experience before adding more bells and whistles to the platform.
• Opportunities – We have the opportunity to become an extremely robust solution once we start partnering with key platforms that complement our product and help us provide a complete solution. This is extremely exciting and motivates the team to become the best at one thing: seamless business travel. We’ll have an ecosystem around us to complete the product and improve the life of corporate travelers.
• Threats – Current threats to Strabe’s growth are mainly travel professional beliefs about the true meaning of seamless business travel and legacy technology companies locking down travel agencies to expensive multiyear client contracts without investing much in new feature development. We’re tackling the first threat by educating our audience about the true meaning of seamless business travel and we’re tackling the second threat by moving fast.

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

The pain point we’re solving is the traveler’s productivity loss during the planning process. Business travelers read an average of five reviews before booking, taking approximately 45 minutes. Unmanaged travelers spend an average of 274 minutes booking air, hotel and car while travelers working with a travel management company take from 15 minutes to three days on average to book.

We aim to make it easy for travelers by letting Strabe take care of the booking process, so they can focus on adding real value to their business. In today’s travel landscape, change is the only constant. You expect better fares, reporting, savings and customer service, all using the latest technologies to save you time, money and trouble. Technology should make your life easier, not add more burden.

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

Our customers are travel agencies offering corporate travel services. We’re reaching out directly to agency managers all over North America, the United Kingdom and Australia via emails, social media and phone calls, and we’re investing a lot of resources in educating travel professionals about the meaning of seamless business travel through various form of content.

Lastly, we are also relying on a great product and customer service to create a successful referral program and grow our customer base organically.

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

Our initial product idea was a smart travel calendar. We built it, and started selling it to businesses looking to improve their business travel experience. Through customer feedback, we realized that we weren’t really solving the problem, we were adding more work for travelers. Now they had to manage two calendars and still spend time online making sure we are showing them the best prices.

We came back to the drawing board and came back to our initial insight: Business travelers are not in the business of travel. This helped us design a tool for people who are in the business of travel (travel agencies) and completely remove the planning process from corporate travelers. Travel agencies are also facing a lot of pressure as many corporate travelers are expecting them to have a web and mobile interface. Strabe enables travel agencies to have a web and mobile portal that truly enhance the capabilities and the overall customer experience. As far as total addressable market, the business travel industry is a growing market, expected to reach $1.65 trillion by 2023.

How and when will you make money?

Our current pricing model is $50 per user per month. We charge this to travel agencies, and Strabe is free for corporate travelers. Every agency starts with a 14-day free trial, followed by the fee. No setup, installation, cancellation or other hidden fees.

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

Strabe’s founding team has deep expertise in the travel industry and SaaS. Strabe is co‐founded by Mathieu Jobin and Ned Nadima. Before Strabe, Mathieu worked at Uber as a software engineer where he helped push many high‐profile features, and Ned led growth teams at many venture-backed startups in Ottawa.

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

Educating travel professionals about the true meaning of seamless business travel has been challenging. The vast majority of professionals believe that the business travel world would experience the same technological changes we saw in the consumer space.

Business and leisure travel are fundamentally different. For someone who only gets two weeks of vacation every year, it’s completely normal to spend weeks, if not months, to find the best destination and value for my dollars. Especially if you have to coordinate with friends or traveling with the whole family - it takes a lot of planning. Self‐serve tools enable you to do your research, make sure it matches your tastes and even plan activities once you are at the destination. It is a big deal.

Business travel is fundamentally different. For most road warriors, it’s something recurring. You know where you’re going, you’re traveling for a set period of time and most importantly, you are expected to do work. So assuming that you will spend the time to find the best hotel, best car and wait for the best price to book your trip doesn’t make sense.

For most companies, business travel expenses fall under the cost to either acquire customers or serve customers, which is justified by the positive ROI they get from it. Expecting travelers to download consumer apps to manage their travel plan is flawed, and we’re working hard to change the mindset of travel professionals.

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

We are augmenting agencies’ abilities to serve their corporate travelers and grow their businesses. Strabe serves a real purpose and benefits the entire ecosystem. By removing the planning process out of traveler’s hand, they can focus on doing work and, during their downtime, find local places to visit or eat, knowing that all the Ts are crossed and Is are dotted in the background.

Our current customers are noticing an increase in travel requests as booking travel doesn’t burn a lot of resources anymore. Strabe gives travel agents superpower to serve the road warrior of tomorrow and retain corporate clients as customers by constantly delighting them with truly seamless business travel services.