Triporia is a UK-based hotel comparison site that thinks of itself as an Excel sheet for hotel rates. The idea is to provide rates to consumers quickly, enabling them to get a picture of the location a hotel is in as well as a snapshot of prices.
Once a user has searched on date and destination, the site aims to provide everything from prices, reviews, star-rating, location information including map and Street View and book button.
Booking is currently done via Expedia with plans to bring further partners on board.
Q&A with founders:
What problem does your business solve?
We feel location is everything when booking a hotel. There’s really nothing worse than turning up to a new place only to drive past all the best spots on the way to your hotel, based away from the action, and on a street that looks nothing like you’d imagined.
Of course, you can solve this problem by spending time on various mapping sites and Google Street View, but you end up with 20+ browser windows open, and its near impossible if your researching on a mobile or tablet device, which we find our users increasingly are.
So the aim was to put all of this data on a single webpage. Regardless of which hotel you’re comparing, whether your viewing photos or reviewing facilities, you’ll never lose your place. What’s more, Kris (co-founder) wrote a pretty neat algorithm which will point Google Street View at the Hotel’s front door….
Tabbing through hotels by Street View saves a huge amount of time versus doing it manually, particularly on mobile, but even for a tech native on a desktop computer. Our solution is much quicker.
Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff?
Kris Penner, co-founder, chief technology officer
Jamie Rose, co-founder, head of operations and search
Rav Sandhu, co-founder
Fred Gasse, front end engineer
Uday Singh Chouhan, head of QA
Funding arrangements?
Triporia is self-funded by co-founders Jamie Rose & Rav Sandhu. The majority of our cost base is in software development and we’re continually looking to improve, so having Kris Penner onboard as a partner has made that possible.
Revenue model?
CPA (affiliate)
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
The website is free to use. We feel we have a competitive map offering versus the competitors, which we believe will become increasingly important as mobile and tablet devices become more popular.
Tnooz view:
While an initial search for hotels in Barcelona in May took a while to return results, subsequent searches for different destinations were faster.
What the user gets in terms of information is useful however with everything from prices, rates, reviews, location information and more. It's also easy to filter down the results by price, star-rating etc as well as click between the hotel information, maps and Street View without clicking out to a different page.
One thing that appears to be missing is actual review information given how much consumers seems to rely on reviews from others these days. However, that information is provided by the booking partner once the user clicks on the book button, so maybe that will suffice.
The user experience on mobile also seemed fast and user friendly.
On the downside and as noted above, Triporia acknowledges it needs to get some more booking partners. Consumers click around to compare prices for properties in a city and then to compare prices for the same property.
The big question is how will Triporia persuade users to come to the site. It's self-funded and up against accommodation giants such as Booking.com as well as metasearch specialists such as Trivago and Momondo.
We watch and wait but in the meantime, the site might get some traction from a challenge to bloggers to find the most misleading hotel picture compared to what is on Street View.