Today's startup pitch comes from Vamo, an emerging travel startup that promises to fuse a travel agent's ability to handle complex itineraries with the conveniences of a fully-customizable online booking tool.
Users departing from the US and Canada are able to select a destination, and then book complex, multi-city itineraries all in one place.
So rather than having to rely on a clunky airline multi-city tool, which often requires multiple searches and makes it difficult to compare pricing on alternative city routings, Vamo streamlines the process of evaluating multiple options on a complex itinerary.
Users are first prompted to select flight options from "Best," "Cheapest," and "Shortest," and then are pushed into selecting lodging. Prices include all fees and added charges, and users receive actual cash back at the full completion of any hotel bookings.
The startup has just emerged out of public beta, with destinations such as Europe, India, Australia and Japan available for booking. Click here to see the full list of destinations currently offered.
Vamo is not disclosing sources of inventory but says it is working with 5-6 partners for its bookable inventory. Also, its important to note that the startup is not the merchant of record. Founder and CEO Ari Steinberg:
We are not the merchant of record, we are more like meta-search. We are happy to help out with customer service but for the most part it's the underlying agency that is handling the payments and therefore providing support at that level.
Read on for the Vine, Q&A and our take on the startup.
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
I was doing a lot of traveling and I found that putting together the right itinerary was key to having a great trip, yet it was also tedious and hard to get right.
I believe this actually stops people from taking trips, or pushes them to see fewer places than they would otherwise like to.
In one case, I planned out a whole itinerary, casually mentioned it to a couple of friends, and suddenly 8 other people wound up coming along. By making the planning easier, I was able to unlock people’s latent desire to travel.
What is the size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
The team is currently 9 people. It’s a really strong group of people coming from Facebook, Microsoft, Redfin, Hulu, Expedia, Stanford, Harvard, Carnegie Melon, Berkeley, and University of Washington. The founder is Ari Steinberg, who previously was a director of engineering at Facebook, in charge of their Seattle office.
What are your funding arrangements?
$1.6 million in seed funding from a variety of angel investors including Adam D’Angelo, Bono, Max Levchin, Hadi and Ali Partovi, Keith Rabois, Spencer Rascoff, Sam Shank, and SV Angel.
What is your estimation of market size?
We are currently focused on overseas leisure travel. This is just a fraction of the total travel pie but given the sheer size of the overall industry, even this niche presents a significant opportunity for a startup. Of course, our goal is to expand into broader areas down the road.
Please describe your competition.
We chose to work on this problem because we believe it is a niche that is underserved by existing larger companies and too challenging for most startups to tackle. So, there are many companies (eg Google, TripAdvisor, Kayak) broadly in the same space, but none are direct competitors in the short term.
We have partnered with a number of companies in the travel industry in order to pull together all the data our customers need to plan their trips. For example, Rome2rio has been a great partner of ours for transit information.
What is your revenue model and strategy for profitability?
For now, we are focused on building a product that people find useful. If we can provide value to people who are making these large purchases, we believe there will be plenty of revenue opportunities down the road.
What problem does the business solve?
Vamo algorithmically optimizes multi-destination travel search, making it simple for travelers to plan and book big trips. The user tells us where they want to go, and we spit out an itinerary showing all of the best transportation and hotel options.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
We have been through plenty of UI iterations, but they have all been about simplifying. The core challenge for this type of product is providing flexibility without overwhelming the user, so it has taken a lot of iteration to balance those often conflicting goals.
The bookings we're seeing have confirmed our suspicions - people are looking to spend ~10-14 days and are planning to visit multiple destinations on those trips. The most popular cities so far are Paris, London, Barcelona, Rome, and Prague, most popular countries have been Italy, France, Spain, and Greece.
Biggest request so far has been to expand coverage to more places. We previously added support for Canadian departure cities, and tomorrow (as I mentioned) we are adding 14 new destination countries including India, Australia, and Japan - the top 3 requests.
Why should people or companies use the business?
We take the frustration out of optimizing itineraries for trips with multiple stops. For experts who offer travel advice, we give them easy tools to share itineraries.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
We are focused on building a great tool that people love. There are lots of tactical things we can do to help facilitate growth beyond that, but there are no silver bullets beyond having a great product.
We are already starting to see the virtues of this approach as there has been amazing sharing and word of mouth from initial users that can’t wait to share this tool with their friends and networks.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
We hope to become the first place people go when they are planning a vacation. The most difficult challenge will be building awareness of our product for the people who need it.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that it requires a startup like yours to help it out?
There are all kinds of structural challenges to building technology and gaining market adoption in this industry. The problems are inherently quite complex - both on the computational and design sides.
This has pushed everyone to focus on the “lowest common denominator” and neglect these bigger trips. Addressing big trips requires money, time, and strong technical and design competency - a combination of assets that is rare for most companies (big or small).
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?
Our brand is focused on providing utility above all else. We draw a lot of inspiration from the early days of Google, when they were all about simplicity, speed, and getting people to an answer as quickly as possible.
Which company would be the best fit to buy your startup, and why?
We’re just focused on making our product a sustainable business that users love.
Describe your startup in three words.
See more for less.
Tnooz view:
It's not often that you see a new travel startup pinpoint a specific challenge that also happens to have an attached revenue stream.
Vamo is dead-on in its realization that more travelers, especially millenials, are traveling on longer multi-city trips for leisure. In fact, most professionals under 30 work hard to play hard, and coupled with flexible work schedules, means that many are looking to book flights for multiple cities in one place.
There's just no other tool out there that makes complex multi-city flight and hotel bookings as easy - and fun - as this.
The share/save functionality also ensures that trip planning can be social and efficient - i.e. no longer having to restart a specific search parameter every time that travel research begins again.
The ability to search for flexible travel dates is also imperative - and something that Vamo excels in with its "I don't have a specific date in mind" feature. For travelers who know they want to go on a vacation of X days, but don't care when, this is a wonderful thing.
Clearly the engineering team is strong, and being led by an ex-Facebook engineering lead will ensure a focus on what's under the hood.
In the travel industry, that sort of technology focus is essential. Sure, design is important - but ultimately it's the proprietary technology platform that increases multiples and ensures a differentiation that prevents others from staking out a claim on a startup's territory. Design can be ripped off; proprietary algorithms much less so.
So if the startup can continue to offer a modern design with a back-end system that manages to truly simplify complexity for multi-city itineraries, there could be a winning formula here.