Swiss-based tours and activity technology solution provider Trekksoft (TLabs here) has raised another $800,000 from Redalpine Capital II and other prominent investors in Switzerland.
Sound familiar?
The round comes just six months after an almost identical deal took place.
Again, private investors including Armin Meier, former CEO of Kuoni, Walter Güntensperger, CEO of Active Travel and Adrian Locher, founder and COO of DeinDeal.ch, are involved.
Trekksoft provides SaaS-based technology platform for tour and activity service providers. It claims to have three "large OTAs" ready to go live with its platform by the end of Q1 2014.
CEO and co-founder, Jon Fauver says:
"As history has demonstrated, the fragmented market, high inventory acquisition cost, and lack of live inventory online make it almost impossible for pure B2C marketplaces to succeed in tours and activities."
Fauver believes that success in the tour and activity sector is dependent on three things:
- Making it easy and affordable for tour and activity providers to bring their inventory online
- Facilitating their own direct sales
- Enabling them to connect to extended distribution partners
Trekksoft shared with Tnooz the traffic and booking numbers across all companies using Trekksoft system since January 2014:
- Conversion rate from home page to completed booking stands at 2 .82%, with 155,852 visitors resulting in 4,396 bookings
- Conversion rate from tour details page to completed booking increased drastically to 8.64%
- In terms of visitors to the websites (of tour and activity service providers), desktop had the major share of 79.3%, followed by mobile at 12.9%, and tablet at 7.8%.
Since Trekksoft customers range from a one-man-operator to a large organization, offering 1-hour tour to a 10-day tour, above traffic and booking numbers are a good indication of the industry, according to the company.
Recently, the company partnered with TripAdvisor to integrate its content across Trekksoft’s network of vendors, and display reviews and ratings on their booking sites.
Founded in 2010, Trekksoft has processed over 850,000 tour and activity bookings, and it handles over $8.92 million in transactions.
Its solution is used by 300 tour and activity service providers, and it has more than 4,800 tours in 115 different countries.