When friends started tapping TripGems' founders Maarten Munster and Remon van Hooijdonk for travel tips, they decided it was a business opportunity.
They had even put together word documents to hand out to people and knew of others who had done the same so after a few 'warm-up' projects, TripGems was launched in June.
Joining the founders are web developer Dennis Otten and designer Lex van Bever as well as a team of advisers including Dirk-Jan Koekkoek and Michael van Beers, both Rockstart accelerator mentors.
The newbie has received undisclosed seed capital via eFuture and says it will be looking for additional funding shortly.
TripGems is banking on capturing a slice of the in destination activities space while capitalising on the prevalence of social media in travel.
The team points to figures from MDG Advertising showing that more than 52% of the travelling population relies on social media for inspiration while a Marriott study shows 74% of travellers use social media while on holiday.
However, competition is fierce with not only the likes of Facebook and TripAdvisor to contend with but smaller players including GetYourGuide, Gogobot, CityisYours and Trover.
"They all have parts of our puzzle, but the pie is big enough and by focusing solely on relevant things to do at a destination, we believe we can add more value to the end customer."
The revenue model is to take a commission from the deals sold via the platform, currently being piloted in Amsterdam.
However, TripGems thinks it can also address the problem of commission fees being too high for local business owners as well as give them back some control.
Local businesses (gemmed by travellers on TripGems) will add their deals and have control via a personalised management system with built-in analytics. The startup hopes the set-up will mean:
- Local businesses benefit from lower commission fees and more autonomy in setting their deal.
- Users benefit from relevant and quality activities/deals ranked and reviewed.
- TripGems benefits by being the facilitator and catches a small commission.
Q&A with co-founder Maarten Munster:What problem does the business solve?
TripGems is based around finding something to do at your destination, whether this is a travel tip from a friend, someone else, or a deal from a local business owner.
"You should really go there!" or “It was a great place, but I unfortunately forgot the name” sounds familiar?
The best advice you usually get is from friends. But the process of giving travel advice involves a lot of remembering and repeating the same information to different people.
At TripGems you can keep track of your own travels including keeping an overview of those great places, may it be a bar, restaurant, or a fantastic scenic view. You can share them with friends, and find out how much per cent of the world you have seen.
If you are planning a trip soon, you can search for travel tips from friends or other travellers. A special group of selected people called ‘Insiders’ will even provide more inside information on your next destination. And lastly, special deals will be offered alongside your search, that are curated by you and other travellers.
For local businesses, TripGems provides an opportunity to market deals to a specific group and keep full autonomy on the deal. We’re specifically not a deal site like Groupon, but want to empower the business owners and provide them with an extra online sales channel.
By connecting travellers with local businesses we believe that we can build a great travel platform where there is always something to do.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
Our initial idea was to build a platform where you could only ask your friends for travel tips; however we quickly learned that people actually like to dig up their own travel memories and share the great places they know. So we steered the website towards sharing instead of asking for travel tips.
The pivot (or extension) we are currently making is to add deals from local businesses. We found that everyone is interested in a great deal, but these are usually only to be found in your hometown, not when you are on holiday. With TripGems, we want to fill in this void.
If all of the above fails we are considering pivoting to a travel dating platform, but hopefully we will never get that far.
Why should people or companies use the business?
There are already many websites that help you to get to a destination: flight search engines, hotel booking sites etc. But there is no authority yet on the ‘Things to do’ market, let alone one that involves advice from your friends. This is the place where we want to be. At TripGems you can find hidden gems and great deals, there is always something to do.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
The strategy we are following is to connect to travel bloggers and let them become Insiders as they have more in-depth information on destinations. This has a mutual benefit: they get more exposure to their blog, and we receive more quality content, plus reach out to their audience again.
We have also built our platform keeping in mind three core principles: it should be easy, fun and fast to use. This keeps users engaged and drives the internal growth engine.
Our third strategy is connecting to local businesses and let them offer great deals, which will trigger word-of-mouth, “Did you hear this great place now has special offers too?”
Everything starts with small steps, and for us it is no different. But, we sincerely believe that quality content, whether this is meta data or deals, will attract new users and will help TripGems grow like an oil spill.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years time, our target is to have become an authority on finding something to do at your next destination.
Challenges we hope to overcome are:
- How to capture our audience and keep them engaged
- How to act on spam or invalid recommendations? (i.e. ensure quality)
- How to convince entrepreneurs overseas
- How to keep up scaling our infrastructure
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another start-up to help it out?There is so much ‘travel wisdom’ among travellers on what is hot and what is not, we believe we can unlock this value by providing a platform that works fast and is easily accessible by anyone everywhere.
Secondly, booking an activity anywhere in the world is still something you cannot do easily; we aim to provide a solution for that as-well by building a long-lasting deal platform for both travellers and local businesses.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
There are some many companies out there that inspired us and many others. But having three of the four team members working at the same company before starting TripGems, most of the culture and style is transferred from there.
Tnooz view:
TripGems faces many challenges, trip planning is a crowded space which doesn't seem to currently have the confidence of the investor community.
In addition, location-based activities and deals and the whole 'travel like a local theme' have recently come under the spotlight from some of the larger players which will mean even more competition.
That said, the idea of having the deals platform in the control of deals owners is good but it will need to scale and scale fast to be a reliable revenue source.
The sharing element will also work as according to Facebook, sharing now permeates all stages of travel from inspiration to when you return from a trip but as TripGems points out there's no money to be made there.
The fun and engaging elements such as seeing how much of the world you have travelled are nice to have but will they be enough to foster loyalty and keep people coming back?
If TripGems can truly build relevancy and become the go-to source for what to do in destination and do it in volume then there is something there - we will watch with anticipation.
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