Tripsuit aims to help point travelers to long weekend trips at popular destinations, starting with ones in Europe, based on questions you answer about your tastes and personality.
The site is in beta, but Tnooz readers can give it a spin by entering the reusable password TNOOZ on beta.tripsuit.com.
It's created a fun Vine to illustrate it's pitch:
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
We, Maximilian and Alex, knew each other for years and met in Munich for a casual get-together. We talked about this and that until Alex told Maximilian of his idea of building a mobile app that would make a city trip into a real-life game.
We talked it through and - due to Maximilians’ background in his personalization company - came out with a mobile app that would recommend interesting things around you based on your interests and personality.
We decided to go for that idea together, went to Cologne a couple of month later and pivoted the product from a mobile app to a whole platform helping you find what you want based on your personality.
We were both still in our own companies, which we successfully founded and led. We knew each other for years and have often talked about starting a business together.
Only this time, we had a really good idea to start with. Since we both had experience in founding a company, it was not that big of a jump.
A couple of months later, we completed our team with our technical team consisting of our CTO Oliver and two developers Andreas and Oli, who we could convince with our vision.
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
At the moment we are a team of 5.
Maximilian is CEO, visionary and product manager, with years of experience building digital and personalized products as co-founder of his last company with over 20 employees.
Alex is responsible for marketing and communication. He gathered over 6 years of experience in digital marketing and led his own marketing agency with with 8 employees.
Oliver H. is our CTO, with more than 10 years of experience in software development and IT.
With Andreas and Oliver C., we also managed to get hold of two highly skilled developers with backend and frontend expertise.
Funding arrangements?
We raised a small private round of about €40.000 when tripsuit was founded. In April 2016, we plan to raise a Seed Round of €500k.
Estimation of market size?
As the “digital travel agent”, we operate in the huge market of online travel. The international revenue in this field was about $446 bn. in 2014.
About 1/3 of travelers don’t know where to go and an even bigger number needs guidance in booking the right accomodation and other trip related things. Addressing those undecided travelers at the start, we have an addressable market size of about $150 bn.
Competition?
Although they apply quite different approaches for providing the traveler with great personalized trips, we see companies like utrip or Gogobot as our competition. There are also some fresh startups like tripl or nekst going into a similiar direction.
We are already in contact with some oft them and it is interesting to see how all are using different approaches to tackle a similar problem.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our revenue model is simple. We charge affiliate fees from our partner when a traveler books/buys a hotel or something else that we suggest in his or her travel plan.
By providing highly personalized offerings, we anticipate a significantly higher success rate. By knowing the user more than our competitors do, we enhance customer retention, satisfaction and click through rates.
What problem does the business solve?
tripsuit increases the result of every travel research and booking process and lets the traveler find the best fitting trip with ease.
Studies show that one of the biggest flaws in online travel is that the ecosystem is scattered, intransparent and confusing. Travelers want guidance when trying to find the right destination, accommodation and activities that fit their taste, but have to look after themselves instead.
With tripsuit, the traveler gets rid of all this confusion and replaces it with a system that rates and ranks each and every travel content ona personalized basis: destinations, accommodations, activities, packages, restaurants, sights, etc.
We achieve this through big data analysis of millions of data points, getting to know the traveler with questionnaires, social media feeds and more and combining those two sides with a unique, intelligent travel recommendation engine that calculates which offerings fit the traveler’s interests best.
In the long run, tripsuit aims to personalize online travel in general.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
We wrote a blog post to answer exactly this question.
The first idea of a mobile travel guide making your trip a big real life game grew into this personalized travel agent when both of us, Alex and Maximilian had key moments when on vacation.
We noticed that existing services are not able to provide you with exactly that information you are looking for, but only the “best rated restaurant”, “activity most people liked” and so on. They just do not know which kind of person you are.
In the beginning we thought about a mobile app that does exactly that: providing you with personalized suggestions when on vacation. This changed into the travel recommendation engine idea when we realized, the “not knowing the person” problem starts at the very beginning of every trip.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Every traveler who is in the reserach or booking phase will benefit from our service. tripsuit improves every decision you make during your travel booking process.
Everyone who once missed an educated opinion on where to go, which hotel to choose, what to do on vacation from someone who exactly knows your situation should try tripsuit.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Our team has quite an experience in content marketing and we see this as the state of the art in communication. Our product helps travelers with information and advice. And this is exactly what we want to achieve with our marketing efforts.
Help people where they need us, providing insightful information and be that friend to go to when they need inspiration, advice or information next time they think about travelling somewhere.
In the long run, this strategy helps us in several aspects: It enhances our brand and positions us as a respected, helpful und trustworthy partner. The high quality content acquires new users who are exactly in the mood to use our service. Serious content marketing is also the best method for long lasting SEO success.
Next to that, we have a lot of ideas to use the product itself and our users to spread our word accross the web. We believe that a product that has a high value for customers can - given a product integrated growth strategy - make several users out of one.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
Talking about the product, we see a highly intelligent market platform that helps travelers in every aspect of their trip process. It knows customers like the travel agent next door and anticipates their needs.
We partnered up with the biggest travel providers and offer our API integration for hundreds of smaller specialists for countries, packages, activities, etc.
The company is populated with highly talented business intelligence developers and experienced travel experts, helping thousands of travelers every day to find and plan their next exciting journey.
In order to get there, we have to improve our engine further and ingegrate more partners. Next to that, we have to face the high customer acquisition costs in online travel with smart marketing efforts.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?
The online travel industry lacks qualitative consulting, putting the customer first in the process of finding and planning a trip. This is our starting point: Putting the customer first and listen instead of selling something from what we know fits many people.
Many companies rediscover travel consulting in the digital age, Kayak just announced to build a strong consultant team for their customers. We think that AI and Big Data can offer just that.
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?
Of course it does not fit in every aspect of culture and style, but Amazon’s idea of putting the customer first no matter what is a paradigm we can relate to. We also think that this is the most sustainable way of building up a service - no matter which industry you are in.
Also, Airbnb has been doing a brilliant job in improving customer journey, brand and customer experience in every aspect. They evolved from a private room rental to a global citizen lifestyle brand. There is surely something to learn from their ways.
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup, and why?
Not a very creative answer, but of course every company that wants to improve customer satisfaction and sales by knowing more about the customer and thus being able to provide personalized suggestions for journeys.
This makes many players potential buyers. Expedia (still not very creative) would for example be a company that this technology could be helpful for.
Describe your startup in three words?
Personalized travel consultant
Tnooz view:
"Tripsuit has a promising team, but it has picked a hard nut to crack.
For years, many companies have attempted destination-suggestion services. Six years ago, Joobili used dates as the starting point, Wanderfly and Triporati used interests as a starting point, Tripbase had a slider-based model based on variables a traveler might consider, Planetism tried a budget-first approach, etc.
Of those, only Tripbase has barely hung in there, but it has pivoted to the standard widget and OTA-lead generation model.
Major companies have also experimented with destination-suggestion "widgets," including Kayak, with a map-based approach. But none have yet caught consumers' imaginations.
While it may not be a trip-planning startup in the classic sense, the issues raised in this opinion piece (and the comments that follow it) are worth a read by the founders as a way of understanding some of the adjacent landscape. That article should be an enticement for founders everywhere to think harder about the related set of problems here.
That said, maybe new technology and changing mobile usage patterns have made this an ideal time for a service like this to work -- starting with urban-based millennials in Europe.
As ever, user adoption is the best exit strategy. We're eager to see what's next for Tripsuit."