When you work or study abroad, getting together with friends and family in one place at the same time can be challenging.
After participating, and being a runner up, in a TechCrunch hackathon in London last year, Seeusoon was developed to make it easier to bring people together.
The startup points to the 33 million expatriates that call Europe home and the region is the second online travel market valued at Euro 150 billion per year.
The four founders are chief executive Pierre Becerril, chief technology officer Nil Sanz while Alfonso Garcia-Valdecasas is responsible for business development and Katarzyna takes charge of user experience and design.
Funding to date has come via Euro 400,000 pre-seed investment from two accelerators.
Despite competition in the group travel space, Seeusoon believes few are tackling "distant relationship." The startup mentions Teleport which helps nomadic works move from place to place and targets corporate digital nomads.
Larger entities cover off the package planning market but says Seeusoon, they are not targeting group travel.
As the company looks to develop its user base it is using Skyscanner's API and working on a lead generation revenue model.
Becerril says:
" We find this model perfect for bootstrapping as we grow our userbase. Integrating with Skyscanner and Airbnb allows us to remain focused on our core offering: effective and efficient group travel planning. Future revenue may be derived from offering direct package bookings."
Q&A with Pierre Becerril, CEO
What problem does the business solve?
The Problem:
Organizing a trip amongst a group of travellers has unique challenges. If there is more than one departure city, the planning can become a serious headache.
Group travellers currently:
- Invest significant time to plan their trips and meet at a certain location
- Experience poor atomized searches
- Face various roadblocks due to complex coordination, resulting
in higher expenses
- Hypothesis
Travellers over the past 10 years have evolved and become better informed than over any period in history. Since humans stopped being nomadic 10,000 years ago, we have until the past few years not seen such nomadic tendencies re-emerge.
Groups already have advanced communication channels where they plan their trips, such as Facebook Groups, email, Whatsapp and Skype.
Solution:
- Unique search process that dynamically packages flights + Airbnb
- Travellers can enter different departure cities for which our custom algorithm matches the most cost efficient destinations
- Travellers can use simple shareable links to access relevant content generated by their search, so we do not disrupt the actual social planning experience
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages? The initial idea was to offer a solution to ease the pain of planning getaways for couples in a long distance relationship and to allow anyone to meet more often, cheaper and if needed somewhere in the middle.
We realized somewhere along the way that we could combine a flight metasearch tool that also provides dynamic pricing for accommodation using a short-term rental market place’s listing.
We have maintained our commitment to long distance relationships and for that reason we still offer a feature that allows travellers to select different departure cities to ultimately review the best locations where they can see each other soon.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Seeusoon is 100% free and allows travellers to save time and money by comparing destinations, Airbnb accommodation and flight packages in a single search.
Because we really wanted to take the pain out of group travelling, we also made sharing the trip options a piece of cake.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
We are currently approaching student networks to offer a white label version of our service. The shareability of our trip plans is also a big component in acquiring new users.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years time, we see Seeusoon as the trip planner you will use when you need to book a trip where more than one traveller is involved. Whether we still do metasearch, or switch towards a direct booking model, we want to be the trip planning tool that modern travellers use to stay connected with those they care about.
The main challenges we will have to face are:
Maintaining high conversion rates: we currently position ourselves in the inspiration and research side of the "online travel food chain", which usually generates low conversion rates.
We have to nail retention, as the use case is arguably recurrent on short periods.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?
The industry is lead by large companies and startups that do not have much flexibility when it comes to integrating new offer formats or specialized group planning features. A start-up like Seeusoon is flexible enough to try these new formats and focus on certain niches, left out by the market leaders.
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?
We feel closely aligned to several friends from the travel industry with who we share our vision on the online travel space: from surprise weekend planner Wayna, flight app deal finder Hitlist, or curated accommodation directory and booking website The Poshpacker.
We also feel strongly inspired by Destinia, the Spanish OTA and its co-founder Amuda Goueli, for its great approach to innovation and growth hacking (Destinia was one of the first OTA to accept Bitcoin payments for instance).
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup?
On paper, we might be a good fit for any OTA or metasearch engine looking to explore a niche market or complement its offerings with a new format.
In real life, we would be a good fit for any company that sees the online travel market as an overcrowded yet eager for innovation market and that might be interested in better serving a large number of modern travellers.
To be a good fit, a potential acquirer would share our vision and passion around product development.
Describe your startup in three words?
Long distance shrinker
Tnooz view:
It's true group planning is a headache. You have to take into account people's diaries, different departure cities and individual likes and dislikes.
Cracking the above is no mean feat, yet plenty are currently trying to and for the most part with the 'social' element thrown in.
A plus for Seeusoon is the ability to enter different departure cities with the number of travellers and then get back options. However, with seven or eight pages of possibilities, it might be an idea to present fewer and say something like "we have chosen the best for you."
The Airbnb link is good and your date/destination/number of travellers information is pre-populated. Going forward Seeusoon will need more accommodation options. Your mother-in-law might prefer a hotel.
The softly approach in terms of revenue from lead generation will help the company but the concern here is whether it will stand out from the rest with metasearch flights and Airbnb for accommodation.
Clearly, Seeusoon can see the challenges it faces in terms of scale and retention and starting with student networks is a great idea as they generally need to travel back and forth as well as family coming to visit them.
Lots of startups are buzzing round the group travel segment at the moment, it will be interesting to see who emerges, how it matures and whether it attracts the attention of the online travel giants.
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