TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Ireland-based Travelshake, a social media database for travel and tourism businesses around the world.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Launched in summer 2010, Travelshake created the first social media database for travel and tourism businesses worldwide. The content is presented on a searchable website for consumers to use to plan their vacation.
Tourism businesses can sign up to create a social media microsite and Facebook app to host all their rich media and marketing content.
To date over 1,000 businesses have signed up from 77 countries worldwide.
We’re based in Ireland and the founders are myself, Laughlin Rigby, and brother Fergal. We’re both in our early 30s.
I’ve has held various brand and digital marketing roles with Tourism Ireland and Unilever, while Fergal was previously a technology consultant with Price Waterhouse Coopers and Ernst & Young.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We invested our own private funds to launch Travelshake.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We’re about making social media more accessible for travel planners. Prior to Travelshake, if you wanted to find the latest updates or offers from travel businesses you needed to search facebook or twitter, which isn’t built from a vacation planning perspective.
With Travelshake, you can find the latest information from businesses in your planned destination, without having to filter out all the noise that accompanies the generic social media sites, which don’t put that information in a tourism context.
Our slogan is "Meet the Owners". We put travel planners in direct contact with travel owners and let them access their official information.
We want to cut out the barriers to planning a vacation that come with using intermediaries. If you’re booking a hotel or rental property, we allow you contact the owners of those properties directly with your questions, instead of being blocked from direct communication as is the case with many intermediaries you can now find out, for example, if the village church is close to the apartment before you book it for your friends wedding.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Our core products are social media mircosites and Facebook apps:
Our microsites allow any business, no matter what size, to publish offers and events, upload videos and photos, sync their social media accounts and provide a smartphone mapping service for it location, amongst many other features.
The microsites provide an instant web presence to both new and small travel SMEs.
Some smaller businesses are using our free microsites instead of creating a website for their marketing purposes. From a branding perspective, users can create their own unique URL and branded profile skin.
Our recently launched Facebook app essentially enables companies to incorporate the content from their travelshake microsite onto their facebook page, letting owners offer their fans an ideal travel shopping experience on Facebook.
Many hospitality companies are installing booking apps without giving their visitors any reason to book with them.
Our app addresses this problem by providing facebook visitors with inspiring rich media and content that will increase fan engagement and help convert lookers to bookers.
We have a direct booking link on the app to allow companies let their fans book directly with them. The app, which can be set as the default landing page, includes a video player, photo galleries, a map that sends the business’s location to an iphone, twitter feeds, offers and a lead generating contact form.
The app also provides a custom colour palette to create a branded skin.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
We have two key target customer groups: Firstly, the travel and hospitality industry and secondly travel planning consumers.
At launch, it was key to target the travel industry firstly, to encourage them to upload their content and information. Obviously, there is no point in promoting a travel site to consumers when you have very little content on it.
Our site is open to the entire industry including hotels, restaurants, online travel companies, travel agents, local guides, attractions, tour ops and rentals, to name just a few.
Now, as we have passed the 1,000 business mark, we can also begin to focus on getting our message out to our second key target group, the travel planning consumer.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
We were the investors, so we have been performing validation at all stages of the site’s development. We conducted considerable qualitative research amongst travel owners and more recently usability and functionality testing has taken place.
We also take on board any feedback we get from our social media accounts via Twitter and Facebook, as this can be a valuable source of immediate and honest feedback.
What is the business and revenue model, strategy for profitability?
We are not a booking site and that has been our distinguishing feature from the start. We are not looking to milk the hotelier or the consumer, we’re their friend.
Just like with Twitter and Facebook, our profiles are helping businesses increase their brand’s "Google share" versus the intermediaries.
We let our users book direct and so provide a platform to businesses to increase their direct bookings and reduce the intermediary commissions they have to pay.
So how do we make money? Travelshake is based on a freemium business model. Travel owners can create a basic social media mircosite and "smartmap" Facebook app for free or they can create an enhanced microsite with a full Facebook app for $25 per month.
We also generate some revenue from onsite advertising, firms can buy a monthly featured video slot on our homepage. To compliment this, we also create digital video ads for clients.
Our consumers, the travel planners, can and will always be able to use the site for free.
As we rollout further enhancements on Travelshake, we will also be rolling our new avenues for revenue generation, which may include selling directly to our consumers in some shape or form.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Size and thus flexibility, our complimentary skill set, industry knowledge and determination to succeed.
Weaknesses:
- Funding, as well as awareness and education about the site within the industry.
Opportunities:
- We’re in the rapidly growing social media space within online travel, which provides plenty of opportunities with predicted increases in spend well into the double figures for the next few years.
Threats:
- We’re ahead of our time and, thefore, ahead of market demand.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Our former bank manager.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
Our main success metrics in 12 months time will be site visitors, business sign-ups, industry adoption of our facbeook app, revenue and profit and also if we can afford proper coffee machine!
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.