Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Voyavo is an interactive social travel platform designed with travel companies and their business and leisure travelers in mind. Clients expect our platform to bring Web 2.0 simplicity, enrich a social sharing capability and simplify the trip planning experience prior to booking travel. Voyavo.com offers an online platform to travel companies that link people, places and unique deals.
Voyavo.com has three founders:
Dave Thomson is a product visionary and seasoned user experience design executive with wide-ranging technology experience in the media, business to business, consumer, and financial sectors. Thomson is co-founder, president and chief creative officer of Momentum Design Lab, a successful, global user experience strategy, design and development firm and product incubator based in SOMA, San Francisco. Thomson is also the founding partner, president and CTO of Voyavo.
Joe Preston is well traveled in the world of building successful products and brands. As a founding partner of Momentum Design Lab, Preston has helped forge product and business strategies that have placed Momentum amongst the leading firms in user experience design and development. Preston is leading the professional services effort of Voyavo.
Bruce Kin Huie heads technology marketing and business development with 10+ years marketing and 8+ years direct marketing experience to financial service institutions and online media properties. Huie is the Vice President of Business Development and Marketing of Voyavo, Inc.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Early funding came from the founders to boot strap the launch and early development.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Today, travelers lack an online resource for building, organizing, discussing and sharing travel itineraries with friends and colleagues prior to booking travel. The social aspect of travel planning is missing. Google research suggests the average travel customer visits 22 sites before making a purchase.
Describe the business, core products and services?
The service leverages technology to share travel plans with friends (Facebook and Twitter), colleagues (LinkedIn), bringing relevant information about trip destination; events, restaurants, places of interest all in one place helping to maximize time and enhance the experience.
The platform is designed to assist travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operators to help make their customer’s travel more social and location relevant.
Voyavo encourages business and leisure travelers to easily share travel details with social networks; extend travel planning to include destination activities; invite discussion on trip planning prior to booking and manage travel booking itineraries to conform to budget constraints displayed in a traveler’s currency of choice.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our initial launch is targeted at un-managed business and leisure travelers, however, the platform is designed to assist travel travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operators to help make their customer’s travel more social and location relevant.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Yes. We’ve spoken with a handful of target customers about our current and planned platform services. I came away from all of those conversations confident that we were onto something unique in the travel industry. It is a very competitive industry. The industry spends a lot of money to capture the attention and loyalty of its customers.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Voyavo has two sides to its business. We plan to run our flagship consumer product on voyavo.com as a meta-search based, travel planning site which will serve as both a proof point and an R&D ground for our enterprise platform. Our consumer product's revenue is based on a combination of CPA, CPC, and CPM.
The enterprise platform's revenue comes from a monthly license from brand name travel providers which enables Voyavo to generate a sustainable recurring fee from annual contracts with travel travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operatoring companies catering to business and leisure travel. Revenue is generated by license, integration and per user fees.
SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
Our unique value (strength) combines extended social attributes prior to booking travel; broad availability of destination location information; display of travel fees in multiple currencies; design expertise, experience and agility in development. We continue to update and adapt our platform services to meet the expectations of our target customer – brand conscious travel suppliers.
Weaknesses:
There are some inevitable compromises such as not being all things to all customers. We have created a niche service to focus attention on collaborative planning prior to travel booking. A few customers will say, “but it can’t do this and it can’t do that.” But we know it does what’s important, does it well, and we plan to always adapt and improve.
Opportunities:
Our immediate opportunity continues to be adding customer value to travel brands; adding collaborative conversations to the trip planning process and extending flexibility in destination travel plans for business and leisure travelers.
Threats:
New competitive possibilities may come from development teams within our target customer base and other technology providers interested in capturing the attention of business and leisure travelers.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?
About a year ago after we demoed our alpha to Jeff Katz he told us that our site was for anal retentive users. We didn't agree with him.
We think our platform isn't just about storing your information, its about exploring the area you may want to visit and creating scenarios around it. We think our method for pulling in location-based data from across the social sphere into a structured itinerary and then pushing out your options for feedback to your network is going to change the way people plan travel... and we're banking on it.
Also two different, well known silicon valley investors told us we were not going to make it trying to compete against Priceline. It was pretty clear to us that they didn't do the travel planning in the family so we figured we were pretty safe.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Client companies expect our traveler engagement tool to encourage social interaction, collaborative trip planning discussions, and destination activity bookings combined with typical travel logistic confirmations. Within the initial 12 months, our goal is to establish a core group of B2B engagements with leading travel brands such as airlines, hotels, auto rental, cruise ship and gaming companies; travel aggregators and tour operators.
TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring San Francisco, US-based
Voyavo.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Voyavo is an interactive social travel platform designed with travel companies and their business and leisure travelers in mind. Clients expect our platform to bring Web 2.0 simplicity, enrich a social sharing capability and simplify the trip planning experience prior to booking travel. Voyavo offers an online platform to travel companies that link people, places and unique deals.
Voyavo.com has three founders:
- Dave Thomson is a product visionary and seasoned user experience design executive with wide-ranging technology experience in the media, business to business, consumer, and financial sectors. Thomson is co-founder, president and chief creative officer of Momentum Design Lab, a successful, global user experience strategy, design and development firm and product incubator based in SOMA, San Francisco. Thomson is also the founding partner, president and CTO of Voyavo.
- Joe Preston is well traveled in the world of building successful products and brands. As a founding partner of Momentum Design Lab, Preston has helped forge product and business strategies that have placed Momentum amongst the leading firms in user experience design and development. Preston is leading the professional services effort of Voyavo.
- Bruce Kin Huie heads technology marketing and business development with 10+ years marketing and 8+ years direct marketing experience to financial service institutions and online media properties. Huie is the vice president of business development and marketing of Voyavo.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?Early funding came from the founders to boot strap the launch and early development.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Today, travelers lack an online resource for building, organizing, discussing and sharing travel itineraries with friends and colleagues prior to booking travel. The social aspect of travel planning is missing. Google research suggests the average travel customer visits 22 sites before making a purchase.
Describe the business, core products and services?
The service leverages technology to share travel plans with friends (Facebook and Twitter), colleagues (LinkedIn), bringing relevant information about trip destination; events, restaurants, places of interest all in one place helping to maximize time and enhance the experience.
The platform is designed to assist travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operators to help make their customer’s travel more social and location relevant.
Voyavo encourages business and leisure travelers to easily share travel details with social networks; extend travel planning to include destination activities; invite discussion on trip planning prior to booking and manage travel booking itineraries to conform to budget constraints displayed in a traveler’s currency of choice.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our initial launch is targeted at un-managed business and leisure travelers, however, the platform is designed to assist travel travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operators to help make their customer’s travel more social and location relevant.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Yes. We’ve spoken with a handful of target customers about our current and planned platform services. I came away from all of those conversations confident that we were onto something unique in the travel industry. It is a very competitive industry. The industry spends a lot of money to capture the attention and loyalty of its customers.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Voyavo has two sides to its business. We plan to run our flagship consumer product on voyavo.com as a meta-search based, travel planning site which will serve as both a proof point and an R&D ground for our enterprise platform. Our consumer product's revenue is based on a combination of CPA, CPC, and CPM.
The enterprise platform's revenue comes from a monthly license from brand name travel providers which enables Voyavo to generate a sustainable recurring fee from annual contracts with travel travel aggregators, travel management companies, airlines, hotels, cruise lines, gaming groups, auto rental companies and tour operatoring companies catering to business and leisure travel. Revenue is generated by license, integration and per user fees.
SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Our unique value (strength) combines extended social attributes prior to booking travel; broad availability of destination location information; display of travel fees in multiple currencies; design expertise, experience and agility in development. We continue to update and adapt our platform services to meet the expectations of our target customer – brand conscious travel suppliers.
Weaknesses:
- There are some inevitable compromises such as not being all things to all customers. We have created a niche service to focus attention on collaborative planning prior to travel booking. A few customers will say, “but it can’t do this and it can’t do that.” But we know it does what’s important, does it well, and we plan to always adapt and improve.
Opportunities:
- Our immediate opportunity continues to be adding customer value to travel brands; adding collaborative conversations to the trip planning process and extending flexibility in destination travel plans for business and leisure travelers.
Threats:
- New competitive possibilities may come from development teams within our target customer base and other technology providers interested in capturing the attention of business and leisure travelers.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them? About a year ago after we demoed our alpha to Jeff Katz he told us that our site was for anal retentive users. We didn't agree with him.
We think our platform isn't just about storing your information, its about exploring the area you may want to visit and creating scenarios around it. We think our method for pulling in location-based data from across the social sphere into a structured itinerary and then pushing out your options for feedback to your network is going to change the way people plan travel... and we're banking on it.
Also two different, well known silicon valley investors told us we were not going to make it trying to compete against Priceline. It was pretty clear to us that they didn't do the travel planning in the family so we figured we were pretty safe.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Client companies expect our traveler engagement tool to encourage social interaction, collaborative trip planning discussions, and destination activity bookings combined with typical travel logistic confirmations.
Within the initial 12 months, our goal is to establish a core group of B2B engagements with leading travel brands such as airlines, hotels, auto rental, cruise ship and gaming companies; travel aggregators and tour operators.
TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.