Embark.org is a new entrant into the tours and activities marketplace, with a global platform of various adventures available for booking. Rather than focusing on just short city tours or longer trips, the startup features diverse types of trips as far as length, destination and style. The trips are generally P2P or sourced from locals who want to deliver experiences to travelers.
The mission is to "better connect the world through meaningful and engaging adventure travel experiences" while striving "to highlight adventures of all kinds: things that excite you, get you in touch with different cultures, push your physical boundaries and challenge your preconceptions about the world."
There are eight people on the Embark.org team, each of which contributed to the global perspective of the offering: Jim McLaughlin (CEO), John Wachunas (COO), Brett DeColyse (CFO), Alessandro Rafanelli (CBO), Drei Goldfain (CTO), Giuseppe Fontana (VP User Experience), Derek Spanfelner (VP Content Management), and Anand Kanabar (VP Quality).
Below is a Vine describing Embark's mission, followed by the our startup questionnaire.
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
The idea to create Embark.org sprung to life in 2011, the collective brainchild of a team of good friends with a passion for exploring the world together. We realized that our diverse skillset (web developers, software engineers, MBAs, writers, researchers, educators, photographers and even an airline pilot) gave us the unique opportunity to create an adventure sharing website built collaboratively with and for the amazing travelers and locals we’ve had the privilege to meet along our journeys.
Please describe your funding arrangements.
We bootstrapped our product development and launch cycle and will seek outside funding for growth and expansion in the coming year.
What is your estimation of market size?
Using industry reports from IBIS World Reports and US Travel Association, we estimate the global tour booking market to be around $275 billion dollars and growing at a slow but steady rate of around 3% annually.
Which companies do you see as your current competition?
Spanish P2P site Trip4Real, Vayable, and Adventure.com are currently three of our largest competitors in this market.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Embark.org collects a commission fee on every tour booking. In addition, we plan to implement an advertising model for Tour Hosts and Advertisers to display featured tours and targeted ads in prominent areas of the website.
What problem does the business solve?
The now well-established P2P economy proves that travelers want a way to connect with local hosts who can deliver a more meaningful, well-rounded travel experience.
Adventurers have been largely kept out of the loop, left to either dig through sites like Trip Advisor or get on a boat/bus with a group of travelers afraid to truly connect with foreign cultures. That’s exactly what we’ve changed, by providing our members with the ability to explore, create, book, and share incredibly unique, immersive local adventure tours with a community of passionate, like-minded travelers.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
Founding a startup means you’re always learning, but with a clear vision we’ve been able to avoid major pivots along the way. Embark.org Beta initially provided an information-based platform that allowed us to cultivate our adventure community around unique, filterable activities and member submissions.
Today, with the release of our P2P-style adventure tour-sharing marketplace, we’ve enabled our community to take that next necessary step: to not only discover these new and exciting adventures, but to create, host, and book them as well.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Embark.org offers travelers something no other travel website can: P2P-style adventure sharing supported by a growing database of over 2,500 unique adventure activities and a grassroots community of passionate travelers from around the world.
Whether you want to hike Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, experience aerial acrobatics in Croatia, go wilderness survival camping in Colorado, or just check out the most extensive Cuban adventure resource on the planet, we’ve got you covered.
What's the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Our marketing efforts include paid advertising, social media, SEO, referrals and promotions, sponsored contests, job postings for tour hosts, email marketing, and reaching out to respected travel media outlets like Tnooz.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
3-Year Plan:
- Dominate the P2P travel market in the United States
- Have a moderate P2P travel footprint in key international markets differentiated by adventure-focus
- Strategic partnerships with several major online travel booking platforms such as Airbnb, Kayak, etc.
Challenges:
- Market Building:
- Getting lots of hosts signed up to provide unique, adventure tours will be the biggest challenge. Essentially, we are building the “inventory” for the marketplace.
- Getting the hosts engaged with the platform and excited about hosting
- Trust and Safety:
- With all social/P2P platforms, we need Travelers to trust the hosts they are going to book with
- We will need to vet the hosts for quality, honesty, integrity, etc.
- We will need to allow transparency for the users so that they can review, comment, and share their experiences with other would-be travelers
What is wrong with the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?Contemporary travel culture is moving quickly and decisively in a direction that embraces the idea of experiential travel. In other words, people want to truly feel and be immersed in the places they visit in real time, not just observe them from afar via a pre-planned itinerary.
As of yet, no one in the travel industry has been able to successfully address the needs of this new kind of traveler: passion, immersion, inspiration, simplicity, technology-driven adaptability and a real sense of community. That’s what we aim to fix, with a website that allows our members to explore the world, connect with each other, and book local adventures seamlessly and in real time.
What other technology company (in or outside of travel) would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
Basecamp (formerly 37Signals). They’re a technology company, work almost completely remotely, have primarily bootstrapped their growth and are trying to change the way things get done within their space through simplification.
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup?
Airbnb.com.
Describe your startup in three words?
Adventure Travel Sharing
Tnooz view:
T&A is a notriously tough marketplace to get right. Supply and demand are not easy to balance and the necessity to continually engage an audience that purchases only occasionally is often underestimated. The amount of work it takes to build that demand and supply equally is monumental. Marketing efforts must deliver new customers and those customers must find the right basket of products on-site in order to be most engaged.
And then the brand must really take to the trenches and ensure that the brand is top of mind when these new customers are ready to purchase. With return customers, the brand must also maintain relevance and position within the mental travel toolbox.
Embark.org has a good brand and it fits with the adventure ethos that many of the travelers and hosts resonate with. This sets it apart from more agnostic P2P travel tour platforms, as it has a clearer mission and positioning than simply being a place to book tours from like-minded travelers.