Comencia is a startup that aims to help small- to medium-sized businesses book travel online without needing the help of travel agencies.
UPDATEMonday Sept. 26. This story has been updated with the latest numbers.
It's founded by former Expedia CTO Stuart Silberg and former Expedia VP of operations Mike Cartwright.
Comencia signed an exclusive supply deal with Expedia that uses their hotel inventory of more than 250,000 hotels.
It has a couple of twists: It "pays customers" to use its service, in the sense that, there are no set up fees, no monthly subscription fees, and no transaction fees. Instead, customers get a bit of cash back on completed bookings.
Here's a one-minute video pitch Comencia's CTO made for Tnooz:
Here's a brief Q&A with the CTO:
What problem does your business solve?
Comencia set out to build a ‘Plug and Play’ travel platform to support organizations that either want a simple way to offer Expedia inventory to enrich their existing travel portfolio, or who wish to cross-sell travel as a complementary service to their core business.
Our self-signup and interactive configuration interface allow users to create and deploy a branded site quickly. Responsive design means the full Comencia experience is accessible on Laptops, Tablets or Phones without the needs to install an App. Hosted in the Heroku cloud we provide a fast and scalable solution to users anywhere in the world.
We have more than 50 companies from across the USA, Canada and Europe using Comencia today - based on their feedback we continue to extend our solution with innovative features and functionality.
Team:
We’re primarily a team of 2: Michael Cartwright (co-founder and CEO), Stuart Silberg (co-founder and CTO), with a 7 person development team and 5 remote employees, including 2 sales associates and a marketing resource.
Funding arrangements?
We have self-funded up until now, and are now in a position where we are starting to look for our initial round of outside investment.
Revenue model?
Primarily, we have a profit share model in place with our hotel supplier, Expedia. We operate a freemium model, with monthly subscription fees for our premium services.
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
The beauty of the Comencia model is that we are not asking our customers to pay for our solution. We don’t charge a setup fee, a service fee or a hosting fee – in fact we pay 4% back to our customer’s for their loyalty.
External validation?
Since launching in June we have over 50 customers from around the globe. We have recently been selected and promoted by Expedia’s Affiliate Network as an approved partner to replace their Chameleon Template solution that they are decommissioning at the end of 2016.
Tnooz view:
The user interface has some nice options, like hotel search by office location, not just by city, and the company promises to add detailed reporting that shows where in the world employees are at any time.
The company claims to build for clients their own, white-labeled, travel booking site within a day for free, but we haven't tested how well it executes on that. Speed and usability matters.
It's impressive that Expedia Affiliate Network has recommended Comencia as one of only two partners for its affected affiliates to migrate to a new template service. In the UK, Comencia has signed Just Giving, which are about to launch Just Giving Hotels -- a step in the right direction.
It's unclear how many businesses want an exclusively do-it-yourself approach. If a volcano erupts in Iceland and strands thousands of planes, will companies be happy? Partnering with a few agencies that Comencia could recommend to parachute in when problems arrive might be worth considering, at least theoretically.
We'll be interested to see how this startup develops.