TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring New York City, USA-based AvidTrips.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Sanem Erucar (founder and CEO of AvidTrips). Prior to starting AvidTrips, I was with IAC (Internet conglomerate with 30+ brands including Ask.com, Match.com, Citysearch, DailyBeast, and Mindspark).
I was a former consultant at McKinsey & Company and prior to that I was with Reuters Plc and Prudential Securities Investment Banking. I have an MBA from Kellogg School of Management and a BA in Economics from University of Virginia.
I am an adventure traveler and I saw an unmet need in the adventure travel market. I married my passion for going on horseback riding vacations with my experience in online media and started AvidTrips.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
None. AvidTrips is self-funded.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Adventure travel is a highly fragmented and an inefficient market. Adventure travelers are loath to use a local operator or an unknown entity to book an outbound excursion - the perception is that too many things can go wrong.
Local operators lack the marketing savvy and outreach to break down this perception.
The middleman in the mix is the tour repackager, whose mark-up can easily exceed 100%.
As a result, both sides lose: the adventure traveler often ends up overpaying and local operator loses out on creating a great customer base.
Describe the business, core products and services?
AvidTrips is a global community and online platform connecting adventure travelers with authentic adventure trips through local operators.
AvidTrips offers the best of both worlds: local agent pricing with the transparency, efficiency and security that comes from booking directly online through an American company.
AvidTrips provides local tour operators a dashboard so that they can upload their content and inventory into its system. Travelers can then search, compare and book trips directly on AvidTrips website.
More so than any other travel, local and technical expertise highly matters for adventure travel.
Local operators are the best positioned to provide insights on local conditions and technical requirements at the destination.
AvidTrips connects adventure travelers directly with the local tour operators who will be hiking, biking and climbing alongside with the adventurers at the destination.
AvidTrips is also creating a community where adventure travelers can share their experiences, read reviews and see products geared towards their particular passion.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our customers are adventure travelers looking for a new destination to take their skills to the next level or travelers who are looking to try a new adventure.
We launched our beta site in August 2010 with several verticals including horseback riding, trekking, mountain climbing, safaris, cycling and water sports.
We are expanding our categories to reach a broader set of adventurers.
Our beta operators are local operators that we reached out to initially based on personal recommendations or through other sources such as trusted publications or associations.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Absolutely. We provided access to our alpha product to a select group of operators and customers and got great feedback.
From the start, we have been incorporating input to enhance our product.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
AvidTrips offers free service to travelers looking and booking their trips on the site.
It takes a commission from tour operators for each trip sold. In addition, we plan to generate incremental revenues from advertising, up-selling and cross-selling products to travelers and operators.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- We get great feedback from adventurers on how clean and easy to use our site is and how tailored the user experience for adventure travelers. Our operators value the exposure they get as well as our performance based revenue model.
Weakness:
- We’re a startup with limited resources. We are hiring people to scale up our inventory and content.
Opportunities:
- We want adventurers to rely on AvidTrips to find inspiration and to book their trips - wherever they are and wherever they are heading.
Threats:
- This is a very fragmented and highly competitive market. We are focusing on making the customer happy which ultimately determines the winner(s) at the end.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?We got feedback saying that we should not get into booking, but become a lead-generation site.
There are thousands of lead-gen sites on the web, and we wanted to do something different and actually solve the problem of searching, booking and connecting from beginning to end.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Having a global network of operators in all key markets and destinations along with a very respectable revenue number.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.