TLabs Showcase - TripSwarm

TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based trip planner and flight search site TripSwarm.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

TripSwarm is a small startup currently with five employees. Our employees include two programmers (Nick Pannuto, Billy Lindeman) one external marketer and advisor (Philip Bator), one financial officer (Jaymie White) and one executive director (Jammond Hayes Ruffin).

Nick Pannuto is a former Junior Game Developer at Vectorform. He has expertise in Objective-C, Cocoa, HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, as well as Apache and Ruby. He has recently began developing iPhone Apps on the Cocoa platform.
Philip Bator is the editor and first employee of the startup company Texts From Last Night (textsfromlastnight.com). The company has recently signed a book and TV deal.
Jaymie White is currently an entrepreneur in Dan Gilbert’s business incubator Bizdom U. His past employment includes investment banking experience with Merrill Lynch and Sales and Trading experience with Lehman Brothers
Jammond A. Hayes-Ruffin is currently a web analyst for Zaaz/Teamdetroit and a part timer for the Michigan Democratic Party as Chief Technologist for Youth Outreach. In a past life he worked for the Venture Technology firm, Remarkable Wit, as the sole employee/entrepreneurial assistant to Marcus Whitney (CTO of Moontoast and Partner at the Venture Capital firm JumpStart Foundry).

What are we: TripSwarm.com provides the perfect bespoke travel experience to the cost conscious excursionist. We are looking to offer a customizable travel experience to all consumers.

Besides, a flight and hotel search engine, our features include a self published itinerary, knowledgeable trip advisors, social automation, and budget information.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are a bootstrapped startup currently financing operations internally. We are actively looking for outside funding.

What problem are you trying to solve?

We are building an all-in-one travel site that takes users from flight search, to itinerary planning, and finally publishing to your friends.

We are looking to make the travel experience a more social and interactive one. With features like a Travel Playlist, travellers will be able to show off their travels in a slideshow format including personalized journal, photos, and video.

Describe the business, core products and services?

TripSwarm offers the ability to create an itinerary which will include flight information, hotel accommodations, and activities selection. The traveler will then be able to publish this information to friends on various social networks.
The site will allow trip advisors to comment on a customers travel itinerary. This feedback may be instant or occur over a period of time as defined by the customer. The trip advisor may offer suggestions on places to visit and hotels to stay at while vacationing. The traveler ultimately may choose which activities and hotel they wish to stay at, and purchase it.
Social Automation is a drastic improvement on the current concept of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing fails because, for a question to be answered, a user must actively publicize it; attracting other users with the specific knowledge they seek to answer their questions. This process begs the question: why find the people with the answers, when I can just find the answers? Social Automation is about delivering the answers to our users.
Our service allows travelers to have view the total cost of their visit (which includes flight, hotel, and activity information). No other site offers a view at the cost of an entire customizable vacation visit. With these differentiation services, we can grow in the online travel and activities space.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Gen Y (those born after 1980) makes up 12 percent of all U.S. leisure travelers and those traveling in this group take and average of 3.9 leisure trips per year. Gen Yers also represent 13 percent of all business travelers and take an average of 4.2 business trips per year.
Solo travelers, those who travel alone with no companions, comprise 11% of all U.S. adult leisure travelers. Solo travelers take slightly fewer trips per year (4.3) than those who travel with other adults (4.8).

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, we asked between 30 and 40 people what features they would like a travel website to have, thus creating our service.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We are looking to charge from the following:

Flight and Hotel purchases - using Kayak’s API will allow TripSwarm to make a small fee from every flight and hotel purchase from our site.
Custom Itineraries - offering different places to visit in a TripSwarm sponsored custom itinerary will allow for revenue. As of to date we have not yet determined exactly how we will charge from the service but are considering a tipping service or a percentage.
Trip Advisor - TripSwarm trip advisors will suggest places to go and things to do for travellers looking to explore different cities. This service will be on a tip basis as travellers will be allowed to tip based off of service.
Advertising.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

We are entering the online travel industry in a niche market. We are looking to offer a unique experience to travelers by providing a custom itinerary to all consumers.
Offering a more interactive experience is unique in that no single website takes the activities someone can do at a destination and allow for a social automation and playlist of the experiences.

Weaknesses:

Improvements - for our company, we could have more experience in the online travel industry in terms of building the website.
We are a small competitor looking to enter a market where the larger companies own a large share (Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz, Kayak, Tripadvisor, Travelocity)
Our competitors have the edge in terms of market share and name recognition. They also have a larger budget then ourselves, awarding them the opportunity to respond to incoming competitors.

Opportunities:

The trends within the travel industry are a move to more mobile offerings. The latest research from The Nielsen Co. shows more consumers are turning to travel mobile sites and apps to access information, book flights and hotel rooms, and rent cars anytime, anywhere
We foresee a more interactive online experience within the online travel industry. Priceline has been able to succeed based on the ability to offer lower prices an in interactive way. Kayak.com and Tripadvisor, industry leaders, have been able to grow due to their offerings of reviews and traveler insights.

Threats:

Building a recognizable and trusted brand.
Competition copying our idea. This threat is large because companies like Expedia could simply connect with yelp and foursquare and offer the same features as us
External changes that present opportunities are larger companies like Google moving into the space. As an indirect competitor, Google is looking to offer travel times and prices, but is not looking to actually sell tickets for the time being.

Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?

The main concern people had with our idea is that it can be copied quickly.

We decided not to listen to them because we fill that an idea like this is mainly in delivery and customer service. Although our idea can be copied, technically, it cannot be copied in its delivery.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The success metric is for our company to have around 10,000 consistent users with our company hitting 10% over breakeven point per month.