Trekkel is a new travel startup iterating on the travel planning process through curation, personalization and intelligent day planning.
This combination moves away from inspiration and into actionable, personable plans for travel. Especially interesting is the intelligent day planning concept, as the service can map out a way to tackle a particular destination in multiple parts.
The team believes in creating an intelligent day planner, with the tagline "travel planning simplicity."
The company uses the familiar slider interface to aid travelers in curating their own ideal in-destination experience.
The Vine below offers an overview of the startup's approach to travel planning, and the Q&A with co-founder Christopher Dworin goes further into the perspectives driving the product.
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
I was a lifelong vacation traveller, and avid user of guidebooks and other tools for travellers. I looked at the landscape of online travel planning tools and found them all to have significant drawbacks. Many of them seem to have been conceived by engineers—not by travellers.
One need only look at some of the absolutely impossible itineraries many suggested (and continue to suggest) to realize that they weren’t thinking like an intelligent travel planner would. I wanted to create a more useful, realistic set of tools that built on two important premises.
The first is that every traveller is unique and has unique interests, and that one-size-fits-all suggestions don’t serve travellers very well.
One primary goal was to ensure that the planner would be able to determine easily what a city has to offer that would be most fulfilling to them as an individual. With unlimited possibilities and very limited planning and travel time the travel planner has to be very selective if they want to get the most from their vacation.
The second premise is that vacations are most satisfying if one can minimize the time spent getting from one place to the next. An intelligent travel planner creates daily itineraries that focus on just one or two of the most important things and then looks for other things worth seeing and doing in the vicinity of those focal points—on foot wherever possible.
Trekkel’s entire approach and design was created by starting from those two goals and then working backwards to construct a process and set of tools that would best support them. Broadly speaking, Trekkel’s proprietary algorithm and personalization tools were designed to support the first goal, and the mapping, MyTrekkel itinerary building, and calendar tools were built specifically to meet the second goal.
What is the size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
The team consists of myself, as CEO and founder, and a team of 7: programmers, graphic artists, and marketers.
Please share your funding arrangements.
Trekkel is self-funded.
What's your estimation of market size?
As a general travel planning tool, Trekkel is potentially of interest to the tens or hundreds of millions of adults who speak English and plan city vacations in cities covered by Trekkel.
What is your current competition?
Virtually every travel planning tool available could be considered competition to Trekkel, though no one else is taking Trekkel’s specific approach to travel planning. Examples of direct competitors include Gogobot, UTrip, TouristEye, Desti, Stay.com, MyGola, Triposo and others.
What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Revenues will come from commissions on hotel and tour bookings and sale of gear, highly targeted special deals, advertising, sponsorships and new proprietary products in the planning stage. We recognize that there are many sites vying for those same dollars, and are taking the approach of keeping our burn rate low so that Trekkel can survive indefinitely while we build our userbase and revenues.
What problem does the business solve?
There’s an extraordinary amount of information available about city vacation destinations, but the tools available for sifting through that information and turning it into an actionable plan we believe are sorely lacking.
Existing tools are generally one-size-fits-all and do a poor job of helping individuals quickly zero in on the things they’re most likely to want to see and do. And most such websites and apps provide very rudimentary tools, if any, to help the traveller plan each day in advance in an intelligent manner to minimize time spent in traffic and maximize time spent enjoying the things the traveller wants to do on vacation.
Our solution: Trekkel offers a curated, but broad, selection of sights, activities, accommodations, eateries and shops in a wide range of prices and interests, based on analysis of 100,000s of online reviews, existing guidebooks, on-site visits and personal knowledge of Trekkel team members.
Each such listing is then broken down into a dozen potential categories and rated internally in each. The traveller indicates his/her level of interest in those dozen categories for that particular trip and Trekkel’s algorithm then re-rates and re-orders all of that cities listings to bubble up to the top those things most likely to be of interest to the traveller. We eliminate much of the drudgery of planning to let the user focus on the fun part of planning. We don’t try to plan for the traveller; we just make it easier and more efficient for the traveller to plan a successful vacation.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
We believe the initial idea is as relevant today as when we first started. Trekkel still solves a problem that we don’t believe our competitors handle well. So, the version of Trekkel that is live today adheres very closely to the concept we developed in the initial planning stages.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Almost anyone planning vacation travel has a limited amount of time to devote to that planning. It might be an hour or it might be a month. In either case, using Trekkel saves them time spent on the tedious part of planning so that they can apply themselves more to the fun part, such as learning about the city’s history, or about that special art exhibit they want to see.
Trekkel makes it easy for the planner to figure out what they’d like to see and do each day and to build an itinerary intelligently. No more suggested itineraries that require a jetpack and a 36-hour day to fulfil! With its sophisticated mapping tools and filters Trekkel enables the planner to choose a hotel that’s well-located for their needs, and then to plan each day intelligently around a focal point or two. That helps the planner minimize time on vacation they would otherwise spend spinning their wheels in transit each day and assures that they don’t miss anything nearby where they’re planning to be.
The user can then save their plans and share them with friends to seek their input.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
We are pursuing a multi-pronged user acquisition strategy, including pursuit of strategic partnerships with organizations interested in offering travel planning tools to their users/members. We have a proprietary product in the planning stages that will enable us to offer revenue sharing opportunities to such organizations. We also are currently planning a marketing campaign designed to broaden public awareness of the Trekkel brand.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
We believe that in three years Trekkel will have established a significant core membership base and will be a profitable company. We will expand the coverage of Trekkel to include major cities on a number of continents and to continue to expand coverage in North America. We are adding mobile apps in the very near future. The biggest challenges are the same faced by all travel planning sites: growing the user base, keeping users involved and monetizing their use of Trekkel.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
The tools available to people planning vacation travel provide a huge amount of information, but do not make it easy to narrow this down to actionable items and then don’t make it easy to plan intelligently day-to-day itineraries that minimize time in transit and maximize time enjoying the destination.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
One company, in particular, has inspired us during the design of the Trekkel service—Apple. Apple has been ferocious in its efforts to create products with designs that are simple, elegant and functional. We wouldn’t begin to claim that level of success, but have put a great deal of effort into trying to make Trekkel’s design attractive, and straightforward. As Apple has so successfully done, we’re trying to build in a great number of useful functions, but present them in a manner that is natural, easy to use, and friendly, and that don’t overwhelm the user.
Tnooz view:
The most interesting part of this service is the intelligent day planning - by clustering activities, the service could actually prove very useful, especially in a smartphone interface that can act as a de-facto travel guide planning each day around a group of geo-located or otherwise similar activities.
Of course, it's impossible not to be skeptical of another trip planning application. Many have come and gone, and surely more will arrive - and it continues to be a nefarious and nebulous market niche that doesn't often leave a clear winner.
The slider interface is also something that is familiar to users - say a slider that allows a user to weight a vacation more towards a beach or cultural vacation - so it's unclear whether this UI works well in this case.
Ultimately, it comes down to both the power of the algorithm to correctly match users and the power of the co-founders to build a community of users that come back often. Creating this community is perhaps the largest hurdle, as many other startups have experienced, since travel is not something that generally happens every day. This periodic nature of the business means that an ever-larger scale is needed to ensure a steady stream of customers throughout the startup's lifecycle.
Another one to watch, and only time will tell how these challenges are met.
NB: City image courtesy Shutterstock.