Trip Ninja pivoted three times since its founding in 2014. But the Halifax-based startup finally launched FlexTrip, in June 2017, followed by FareStructure, this past February. Both products allow travelers planning multi-city flight bookings the ability to search for the best pricing available, with the former accounting for flexibility in the route order while the latter maintains the traveler’s preferred city sequence.
“Originally, Trip Ninja was aimed at college students who wanted to travel to Europe, but market research uncovered greater market potential and expanded target customers through a B2B business model,” explains Julieta Collart, Trip Ninja’s senior business strategist.
“Today, our B2B model allows us to scale to a global audience, leveraging existing online travel agency brands, booking processes, customer service and marketing, while maintaining our focus on algorithm development.”
The fledgling company’s FlexTrip technology enables users to search flight options by the number of days they’d like to spend in each location rather than by date. The product is easily licensed to OTAs as it uses their GDS content as a data source.
Trip Ninja’s technology uses advanced algorithms to find the best route among all the potential combinations without incurring a high look-to-book ratio. FareStructure enables OTAs to offer multi-city flight itineraries that include more than three cities as well as the ability to leverage split ticketing at a level that GDSs do not currently offer, for even better pricing.
Trip Ninja already works with Apollo, Travelport and Amadeus, with the ability to integrate with Sabre if and when a customer requests the channels. In the meantime, the company is onboarding two global OTAs, licensing its API to both organizations although Collart also noted that Trip Ninja is also open to partnerships with other travel providers.
“Our technology is recognized by OTAs as a provider of unique capabilities and innovative technology for customers that helps these online travel tech companies differentiate in a competitive marketplace,” Collart added.
Getting to this point has been hard won for Trip Ninja’s four founding members who bootstrapped the business between 2014 and 2017 when they worked weekends and during free time to get their business off the ground. The hard work paid off as Trip Ninja was eventually accepted into LaunchPad Accelerator and Innovacorp’s Spark Program, also leveraging Canada’s National Research Council’s (NRC) Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) as well as interest-free loans from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA).
“Each of these has been a validation that our company is solving a need as we pitch and wine our business model over and over again,” Collart said.
Through these programs and a $52,000 pre-seed round, Trip Ninja has accessed more than $200,000 to build and commercialize its products.
The company’s founders are a classic reflection of Canada’s diversified startup culture; CEO Andres Collart and his sister Julieta both originally hail from Honduras while COO Brett Ziegler and senior front end developer Rob Dumont are born and raised in Canada. The three men all have engineering backgrounds while Julieta’s experience is in design and business. Collart says:
“With our products, OTA customers can build customized itineraries, easily book hotels, trains, buses and car rentals, while enjoying increased savings.
“Our goal is to develop travel technology products that help OTAs make booking travel experiences easy, fun and more affordable.”