NB: This is a guest article by Valentin Dombrovsky, CEO of Travelatus.
Online travel is experiencing phenomenal growth in Russia with startups emerging thick and fast and a number of funding rounds revealed recently making it an exciting space.
The sector was a hot topic at a recent conference in Moscow and here's a run-down of some of the newbies out there.
Allinway
Allinway helps people to plan their trip, share their stories and find new itineraries. A user's itinerary can be saved as a PDF and downloaded to a mobile phone via a mobile application. Allinway can be used to create and share travel stories, for example, through integration with Instagram.
You can find itineraries that were shared by other users too. The creators of the service plan to earn money through affiliate programs, advertising and premium services for users (they didn't give exact examples of such services). They mentioned Travelmuse, Stay.com, Trippy and Tripomatic as their main competitors.
App in the Air
App in the Air is a free mobile app to help travellers during his preparations for the journey and on the way. It provides useful tips for travellers - like places where he can eat at the airport or information on places where he can connect to wifi. The app shows the status of your journey (for example, how much time is left till landing). It also provides notifications such as boarding gate change, for example.
The service can be used to get information about destinations - for example, you can find out what is the best way to get from the airport to downtown.
The creators plan to earn money through special deals and offers (and have already partnered with Expedia and Hotwire).
Trego.Travel
Trego.Travel is a social travel planning service, or social travel discovery platform, as it's called by its creators. Its founders' vision is on online travel hub where people can get the ideas for their trip, plan their journey and get a full range of services for it.
The service is based on the visual components, concept of smart content, social integration and services from dozens of service providers. So the creators of the service plan to make it the starting point of every independent trip. The revenue model for Trego.Travel is commission based.
Travolver
Travolver wants to change the way people plan their leisure travel. The startup wants to turn travel planning from searching for destinations to searching for local experiences that will best fit the user. Experiences can be found on the map, so the user can easily browse through them. It also plans to provide standard travel services as hotel booking, air tickets and car rental.
The whole trip is presented in the form of a storyline that can be changed with the participation of friends who join the user on his trip. The service also has the ability to connect the user with locals who can provide additional services regarding the chosen experiences.
Travolver has also announced the launch of a mobile app with local experiences recommendations.
Excursiopedia
Excursiopedia is a marketplace for guides and local activities. It tries to solve the problem of connecting with thousands of local service providers. The local activities provider lists his inventory on the site and clients can communicate with him directly using the Excursiopedia platform. They can even ask for tours tailored to their specific requirements.
The site takes a 15% commission for its services and the platform currently has about 7000 offers worldwide, about 3000 service providers, 900 destinations and is translated into seven languages.
It has also about 80,000 unique visitors per month (traffic grows about 20 % monthly according to the presenter) and sells about 150 tours a month with a gross value of Euro 40,000. The ambition is to become the Airbnb for tours and activities (like so many, I guess).
Interestingly, the presenter was asked about the name of the company, which is rather hard to pronounce in any language, and said it was chosen for two reasons:
- It's truly international
- It's easy to remember unlike the names of competitors.
Excursiopedia ended up winning Startup Battle at
TechCrunch Moscow 2012 where 40 startups, including the five above, presented their ideas over two days.
NB: This is a guest article by Valentin Dombrovsky, CEO of Travelatus.