TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Germany-based tour and activity marketplace Tripodo.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Tripodo is a travel market place for customized tours. Our focus are personal tours that are arranged on a request of a customer, taking into account his or her indivudual requirements.
Furthermore interested people can find travel offers for different types of travel, such as city breaks, education trips, camper travel or farm holidays.
The Tripodo management team: Business manager Dr Filip Grizelj and partner Holger Nagel are experienced online marketing manager and consultants with expert knowledge for many years. Together they have decided to establish a new platform that can make your dream holidays come true.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Personal savings and business angel support.
What problem are you trying to solve?
The trend is moving away from all inclusive tours towards individualized tours. The online market gets more and more importance for the travel sector but nevertheless for clients the personally consulting service is fundamental.
The Tripodo management team picked up these problems and created the Tripodo system. Clients can see different travel offers and if they have special wishes for their holidays, it is possible to complete a short questionnaire for getting in touch with fitting tour operators.
In this way, clients could find their dream holidays very fast without searching it for several hours. If they use the form for their special inquiry, they have the chance to choose whether they want three, five or ten offers of tour operators. In every case the clients can compare regarding quality and price of the offers.
For tour operators the Tripodo system has also an advantage. In an easy and fast way they should generate more clients for their services.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Offers are added and managed on the site by the tour operators themselves. The first 5 offers we add as special welcome service. Clients can search the site by destination, type of travel or activity. Furthermore they have the opportunity for using the Meta search. If they can’t find interesting holiday offers, they can use the form for getting a tailor-made journey.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
- Tour operators, travel agents with unique, special and outstanding travel offers.
- Clients with idea to have special holidays and no standard holidays.
- Big travel websites with standardized offers. With Tripodo we aggregate small and specialized travel offers and are able to provide them in one data standard to bigger websites. In Germany we are already working with Travelscout24.de and bring individual and specialized travel offers to bigger partners.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?Tripodo.de is online for more than eight months, we already have a proof of concept and KPIs for potential investors.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
The use of our platform is free, as is user registration and the listing of the offers (without company name or logo). Inquiries can be bought by fitting tour operators for a generated lead price.
The price for an existing offer is Euro 5 and for the individual inquiry is depending of quality, and expected value, up to Euro 20. All transactions are regulated through PayPal. Travel inquiries are sold from three to ten times.
That makes the business model lead very attractive. Since users want to compare offers anyway and travel agencies know that, this business model is accepted by partners. Next step is to provide also advertisng and fixed integrations to travel agencies for additional fees.
That will help partner to get exclusivity's, more sales and Tripodo to get a second revenue stream.
With a unique product we are able to build strong cooperation's and become leading platform for specializes travel offers in the German market. Our knowledge also in meta search engines helps us to provide a easy way to integrate offers on Tripodo for our partners.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Experienced management team with knowledge in online marketing.
- Biggest online travel market for customized tours in Germany.
- Many travel partners.
Weaknesses:
- Small financial resources, need investment to grow faster.
Opportunities:
- More advertising, more travel partners, more consumers, better comparison for consumers.
- Growth of online travel market.
Threats:
- Travellers are not booking their tour through the agents/tour operators.
- Other actors of the online travel industry could enter this niche.
Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?We are thankfull for all kind of feedback, skeptical ore positive. Until now we mostly got positive feedback and only notes what small things we could make better.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
More travel agents, offers and inquiries per month. Find a small Investment and more partners for cooperation.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.