Tripcon is a travel metasearch company built to emphasize natural-language queries on mobile devices as the main way consumers access hotel, flights, destination, and activities information.
Type "I want to stay close to the Tokyo Tower" or "Hotel with a hot spring near Izu", and the site will try to fetch relevant trip-planning information.
Founded February 2016, Tripcon is a fully-owned subsidiary of Shobunsha Publications, one of the largest travel-related publishing companies in Japan. The site has been launched simultaneously in a half-dozen languages: Japanese, English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Thai. For now, it's English-language version is focused on Japan as a destination.
The professional travel guide publisher is providing the travel-related local information that is a core component of its database, and is partnering with online travel agencies (like Expedia, CTrip, Agoda, and Booking.com) and third-parties like TrustYou for the rest of its content.
Here is a one-minute demonstration video:
What problem does your business solve?
There is no easy way to find the best price for the hotel and flights as well as local information when you travel over the world. The Tripcon service allows travellers to easily search and compare travel-related products such as hotels, flights and local information around the world to find the perfect product, and to make reservations at the best prices.
Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff?
Tripcon is 100% funded by Shobunsha Publications Inc.
Daisuke Imai, CEO
Yoshihiro Sakurai, COO
The team also includes 6 full-time employees.
Funding arrangements?
Capital: 150,000,000 yen (JPY), or about $1,470,000.
Revenue model?
Tripcon is monetized by OTA partners with the CPA model.
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
"Natural phrase search" allows you to search like you talk.
Tripcon enables searches using phrases, "I want to stay at a resort with my children" or "I want to eat fresh fish."
Users can instantly get results that match their preferences and moods.
Travellers can search for comparing the prices at more than 850,000 hotels worldwide, and Tripcon publishes information, including local restaurants, activities, sightseeing spots on more than 7 million travel destinations around the world.
When you search for a “location”, information on “local cuisine”, “flowers in full bloom”, “souvenirs”, etc. are displayed together with the search results. In addition, restaurant reservations can be made through cooperating websites.
External validation?
TrustYou, the world's largest guest feedback platform, has been providing meta-review data for the search results on our site. By incorporating with TrustYou's vast review data, we can offer travellers verified guest feedback that positively influences millions of booking decisions every day.
Those review data help Tripcon to categorize the hotels based on true guest feedback, giving travellers the best search experience with Tripcon.
Tnooz view:
Natural language search is a more intuitive way to shop for travel, at least in the research phase — and especially via mobile devices or always-on devices like Amazon's Alexa.
In our unscientific tests, Tripcon's results were effective, though this is still early days for the technology, industry-wide. Let's hear it for a travel-guide publisher attempting to stay ahead of the curve. Its breadth of hotel options is rare for the Japanese market, giving it an early edge.