TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based trip planning and deals service TravelSort.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
TravelSort personalizes travel planning, helping travelers discover new destinations they’ll love, plan with tips from similar travelers and destination experts, and save up to 90% off their ideal hotel.
- Hilary Stockton – Hilary founded TravelSort. Beforehand, Hilary worked as a Project Leader and Consultant in The Boston Consulting Group's New York and Moscow offices and in product marketing for Thomson Reuters. She was a co-founder of Lohika Systems and holds a JD from Stanford Law School, an MS from Georgetown University.
- Patricia Larocca - Patricia leads and manages all TravelSort Partner Relationships. She has over 15 years experience in the travel industry working with companies such as Travelocity, Travel Impressions and Virgin Atlantic Airways. She has been on the Board of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association and a Mentor for Harvard’s Undergraduate Women in Business program.
- Ihor Yuvchenko – Ihor develops TravelSort's technology strategy. Ihor has almost a decade of experience at Lohika Systems, where he built up the company's Ukrainian office, recruited and trained its engineering talent and led teams for Lohika's clients, which include Facebook and Skype.
- Niels Ganser - Niels leads TravelSort's technical development. After half a decade of developing and consulting on Ruby on Rails applications for clients in Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada and the US, he now combines this expertise with his passion for travelling by ensuring TravelSort's backend and server infrastructure keep up with the site's growth.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?Entirely family and friends financing to date.
What problem are you trying to solve?
While the Internet has made possible online travel research and bookings, it’s also generated a glut of information and advice, much of it poor quality, unreliable, or irrelevant to the traveler’s specific interests.
Paying a travel expert is costly, but free information is often too anonymous to trust, and it can take countless hours to sift through online content.
TravelSort is the only service that breaks through the noise to offer personalized travel recommendations, up to 90% off top-rated hotels, a guaranteed answer to travel questions from destination experts, and a vibrant community of like-minded travelers.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Each of TravelSort’s features are designed to help travelers fine-tune their travel options while traveling well and for less. We help with each of the three stages of travel planning:
- Discover great new destinations: After registering, TravelSort members receive proactive personalized recommendations based on their traveler profile, helping them discover new destinations they might not have otherwise considered
- Plan: Members can quickly get relevant advice for their trip with tips from either a TravelSort destination expert or from travelers with similar travel tastes
- Save: Members have access to TravelSort’s exclusive reverse auctions and offers, allowing them to save up 90% off a fantastic 4 or 5-star hotel. We only notify members whose travel tastes fit the hotel being offered.
Our overall approach to online travel is unique within the industry. Namely, we offer more than hotel deals—unlike other online travel services, our personalized approach allows our members to receive specific travel recommendations and advice.
Specifically, TravelSort offers:
- Up-to-date travel recommendations: Once a member completes a profile, TravelSort provides a member with continuously updated recommended travel guides and TravelSort members.
- Traveler compatibility: TravelSort helps each member receive relevant travel advice by assessing how similar other TravelSort members are, so they know whom to seek advice from.
- Exclusive hotel deals: TravelSort provides select deals at top 4-5 star hotels, based on exclusive reverse auctions and flash sales that are available only to members. TravelSort’s reverse auctions provide the best deal anywhere for the featured hotels, with average discounts of 80-90% off.
- Destination Q&A: TravelSort members can easily see other members who live in, or loved the destination, and pose questions to them via private messaging. Members also have the option of posting their question on a destination’s Q&A page to get a guaranteed, personalized answer from a TravelSort destination expert.
- Curated travel guides: These guides, available only on TravelSort, are written with a specific interest in mind, such as adventure travel, foodie travel, family travel, romantic travel, budget travel or business travel. Popular topics have included how to select the best travel credit card, tips for fine dining with toddlers, and incredibly delicious, can’t-miss restaurants in Paris.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?TravelSort appeals to the savvy traveler who wants to save time and money. After a successful beta launch in October 2010, we currently have over 2,000 members located in over 200 cities in 30 countries across the globe.
Our member base represents an incredibly diverse range of travel tastes, destinations and styles—whether it’s trekking Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador, sampling foodie delights in Tel Aviv, or exploring New York or San Francisco with kids in tow.
With its personal travel style profile, online community and hotel deals, TravelSort’s unique personalized approach helps travelers fine-tune their options from one mile away or 10,000 miles away.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
While we haven’t yet sought outside investment, we did survey travelers before starting development, to verify what that finding relevant, trustworthy travel information quickly is a huge pain point.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Our personalized recommendations, traveler compatibility rankings and exclusive travel guides and articles are all free. We do charge to enter our reverse auctions, but our primary revenue comes from running flash sales with hotel partners.
Later, we expect to derive lead generation revenue from making targeted suggestions of travel products and services, based on member profiles.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- We are the only travel site that combines personalized recommendations, our own high quality content, access to like-minded travelers and destination experts, and incredible hotel deals all in one place.
Weaknesses:
- We are a new player in the rather crowded travel space, so as with other travel startups, we have to cut through the noise and make consumers aware of us.
Opportunities:
- The sheer glut of travel advice out there, much of it anonymous, untrustworthy or even fake, makes our value proposition ever more compelling: machine and human recommendations, advice and deals that are personalized to each member, saving time and money
Threats:
- Certainly there are larger travel sites that are also aiming to provide personalized recommendations or deals. Much of the time, however, this is only using one’s social graph on Facebook. We see this as falling short, since your friends may not have been to places you’re interested in going to, and even if they have, may not share your same travel preferences.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Most people have been very enthusiastic about what we’re doing, and their criticism, if any, has been around very specific design choices or small pieces of functionality.
Almost anyone who has spent hours researching a trip wants that process to be faster and to get more relevant advice.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We have a number of metrics we’re tracking internally in terms of user growth and engagement. By this time next year we expect to have sold over $2 million worth of hotel rooms.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.