STARTUP STAGE: Tripfuser takes on planning and tours

Tripfuser

The company was founded in late-2016 and claims to be a new take on the customized trips business.

It is live in seven countries, has 38 employees and includes a number of core elements including a marketplace, chat tools and a trip building platform.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup?

The Business

Tripfuser is a two-sided marketplace. We connect travelers looking for private/customized trips and packages directly to local travel providers so they can plan and book their trips. Four innovations in the Tripfuser business model are driving its success:

1. The Trip Plans

• Every Trip Plan is web-based. Gone are the email/PDF itineraries, and instead travelers get mobile-friendly Trip Plans like a four-day ancient Luang Prabang tour, complete with maps, traveler reviews, etc. Every element of every trip is tagged by type and location, along with the duration, allowing us to create matching trips on the fly as our repository of Trip Plans grow. Already around 40% of the initial Trip Plans generated for travelers for Vietnam and Nepal (our first two launch destinations) are auto-generated using an algorithm we have built. This both cuts the work for local experts and provides instant responses for travelers.

2. The Marketplace 

• Tripfuser is a marketplace for tailored/bespoke travel. Long thought to be an area not serviceable by marketplaces, Tripfuser has created web-based Trip Plans to provide travelers exactly the same marketplace experience for tailored tours/packages as they get for accommodations or scheduled "join-in" tours. The Tripfuser marketplace allows travelers a very visual “tile” view of the tailored Trip Plans from local experts and a “list” view, which shows clearly the various inclusions and exclusions. In both cases, it’s a simple one-click operation to open up each Trip Plan to review details; to share the page with friends and family; to initiate chat with any of the local experts who’ve submitted Trip Plans; and to book.

3. Internal Chat Platform

• Tripfuser, like Airbnb, is an opaque environment where the travelers and local experts only know the Christian names of the people they are dealing with until a booking is made. Critical to closing sales was building in the ability for travelers to chat directly with local experts to ask questions and refine the trip to their liking. We built our own internal chat platform for this, incorporating an algorithm to filter out email addresses, phone numbers etc. so that this dialogue could continue directly between the two parties without intermediation by Tripfuser staff.

4. The Trip Plan Builder

• One thing that turbo-charged the rapid uptake of marketplaces like Airbnb and Uber was their easy-to-use interface for suppliers. We wanted Tripfuser to be no less revolutionary and have developed a simple, powerful and very fast drag-and-drop interface for local experts to create tailored trips. The features are many and include storing all Trip Plans and all products dynamically in the system and auto compression and resizing of all images. Because a Google API is being used to feed up-to-date information on products such as accommodations and attractions, this information is automatically updated when used in new Trip Plans. Whole packages created for others can simply be dropped into the workspace and edited in minutes to create the new bespoke Trip Plan for the clients. Feedback from the first users of the system in Vietnam and Nepal indicates a typical eight- to 10-day custom Trip Plan takes less than 15 minutes to create, versus the one to two hours of other systems. Combine this with our algorithm system, which is able to create Trip Plans on the fly, and you have the perfect solution on the supply side. Another feature local experts really like is the two-way feedback. Not only do travelers rate them, but we are also adding the ability for local experts to rate guests.

The Technology

Tripfuser was developed using the Magento 2 platform, with customizations and additional plugins to address our specific needs. To guarantee a stable experience, we are hosting on Amazon Cloud with load balancers for multiple servers, CloudFront, RDS and Redis technologies. 

We rely on API connections to guarantee our local experts and travelers have access to updated and useful data, such as Google Places as the base for the creation of the travel product, Dark Sky for weather information and Pixabay and Pexels for imagery.

What inspired you to create this company?

A growing demand for a service. Our CEO was formerly the COO of the Intrepid Travel Group and witnessed the strong and growing demand from travelers for custom/private trips. This was subsequently borne out in meetings we had with many inbound tour operators/DMCs we contacted in Asia and Africa who told us that custom/private tours was the fastest-growing area of their business.

The market until now has been serviced by either:

• Travelers going direct to multiple inbound tour operators to get proposals.
• Travelers using what are effectively online versions of traditional outbound travel agents. Travelers complete an online questionnaire saying what they want, and the online agency contacts their local inbound partner and gets a proposal for the traveller to look at. It is clunky (emails back and forth) and the proposals themselves are typically emails or PDF documents. We could see an opportunity make this whole process better for both travelers and suppliers, and in the process create a considerably bigger market.

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

Strengths

• Very deep travel domain expertise; an experienced tech team (who’ve developed and maintain other large travel platforms like Urban Adventures, Hotel Link Solutions, Green Path Transfers); a low-cost base (the tech team is based in Vietnam); and a very experienced online marketing team.

Weaknesses

• We launched just six months ago, hence we have no recognizable brand at this stage.

Opportunities

• The first major opportunity is to make custom trips/tours as easy to plan and book as join-in tours. This should grow the custom tours market considerably. The second major opportunity is to get accommodations using the platform to sell packages (eg  cultural packages, photography packages, weekend getaways, conference packages, multi-property bundles, etc.). Once this happens, the market goes from very large to huge.

Threats

• New competitors with deep pockets and strong brands.

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

For the traveler:

• Choice: We have multiple local experts in each destination, responding to each inquiry.
• Speed/convenience: Instant replies with an algorithm match.
• User-friendly product: Shareable, mobile-friendly Trip Plans. It’s now so much easier to plan a trip with friends/family.

For local experts:

• B2C is the future, but it is hard for local experts when providing itineraries for custom tours/packages. The work preparing custom itineraries is normally labor-intensive and slow, direct communications with travellers hard, and conversions are low. Tripfuser changes this.

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

One of the main channels we’re using is search, both paid and organic. We’ve done extensive keyword research around the types of searches that potential customers might use when looking for our products.

Over time we will be continually refining and optimizing these in order to drive our profitable traffic to our site.

Additionally, we’ll use this insight to build out high-quality content in order to rank organically for profitable keywords, reducing our customer acquisition cost over time.

In addition, we’re building out segmented customer nurture programs to continually stay top-of-mind for customer and potential customers.

Video is an integral component in the path-to-purchase and well beyond the actual trip experience for us.

Ultimately, we are encouraging our local experts to support us in building a massive library of grassroots travel videos, allowing us to provide video content that is aligned to the brand, the regions, the local experts and the thousands of unique micro-stories that help bring the trips to life.

This also provides a sharing opportunity for the traveler and an ideal promotional tool when the local expert produces a nicely packaged segment for them that is Tripfuser branded.

Not only do we provide video training to our local experts using their smartphones, we also provide a simple editing suite for them to use, in a way to control the quality of the outputs and ensuring all content aligns with the Tripfuser brand. 

Having a massive library of video footage takes care of our content needs from a marketing and a trip perspective, plus it allows us to syndicate stories to help drive brand awareness across all of our marketing and social media channels. 

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

It started with a simple observation our founders made in the travel companies we were working in previously. More and more people were looking for private/custom trips.

We then reached out to 25 inbound operators/DMCs in 16 countries to ask their experience. All reported the same trend, with operators in a couple of markets saying custom tours now exceeded the volume of join-in tours they were running.

We also asked about how they were getting inquiries, with most saying that they still got the bulk of enquiries from traditional outbound agent channels, although B2C was definitely growing, whether via direct enquiries to their own web sites or via online sales channels.

Nearly all saw B2C as the future for this business once someone sorted out a business model which removed the main pain points (ie the labor-intensive work in creating custom itineraries, finding a low cost way to connect directly with travelers to discuss changes and finally, improving the conversions for B2C enquiries).

The global activity market has been estimated in excess of $135 billion globally, according to Phocuswright.

We believe there is a growing demand for customer travel within that activity segment of the market.

How and when will you make money?

We make money by adding a marketplace fee to the price the local expert quotes for their tour/package.

We expect it will take around one year on our currently growth trajectory until we break even, however if we elect to scale more quickly this may get pushed back by a further six to 12 months. 

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

The founding team not only has extensive domain expertise in travel, travel technology and travel marketing, but we have an enormous network of contacts in the industry on both the supply and distribution fronts. Our contacts have allowed us both to test ideas and to scale (relatively) quickly.

The founding team are:

• Matt Beard – CEO
• Len Cordiner – COO
• Tuan Nguyen – CTO
• Andre Franchini – CPO
• Nigel Abbott – Marketing Director
• Adrian Cordiner – Digital Marketing

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

There have been three issues so far:

• Building out the network of quality local suppliers. As a new sales channel with no brand and a very different product, it’s been hard to get good suppliers working with us, notwithstanding the fact we had a good network of local experts known to us through other travel businesses who have helped seed markets.
• Tripfuser is a new rich medium for creating Trip Plans which extends way beyond what local experts have used before. The local experts are getting more used to the possibilities with this new medium (video content will also be launched soon), however this is taking time.
• Improving conversions. Traditionally outbound travel agents provided a very important filtering function with travelers still in the dreaming phase of travel, giving them ideas, brochures to go away and study etc. So, by the time an outbound agent sent a request for an itinerary to an inbound operator, the chance of getting a booking was pretty good. When you move to a B2C model inbound agents get frustrated creating custom itineraries when conversions are low, so this led us to developing our trip algorithm which allows us to create custom trip itineraries on the fly drawing from the database of products and trips loaded by local experts in the destination. For travelers just looking for ideas this is perfect (and very fast), and at the same time it reduces the workload on local experts and improves conversions.

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

The market demand is there already. What we are doing in this market is a little like Uber did for the taxi market, ie using a whole new interface for both travelers and suppliers to transform it.