Latin America's online travel sector is warming up on the sidelines, in readiness for its debut appearance on the main stage (if Nasdaq counts).
Decolar, the Argentina-based OTA, is flying the flag for the region and is widely tipped to be in talks with banks for an IPO this year.
Viajala is one of the many smaller online travel businesses in the region looking to see how the investment community responds. The metasearch site is based in Colombia, and picked up $500,000 of funding in April15.
Tnooz featured Viajala as part of its StartUp Pitch series in February 2015. We reconnected with CEO Thomas Allier for an update.
Briefly, remind us what you do?
I am involved in the product and business development, marketing, recruiting new team members and seeking for funds when necessary to grow our venture at the pace we want. I also deal with investors and chair our board meetings.
Where does your role sit within your corporate structure? How much C-Suite buy-in do you need to implement projects? Does your role give you autonomy? How do you work with other departments?
As the CEO, I sit between our board of directors and top management i.e. our CTO, VPs of business development, marketing and operations.
Our board is made up of three directors, two of which are co-founders. This gives us the maximum agility to lead the company.
I define the roadmap with my top management following the board’s guidelines. Then each manager is given a lot of autonomy to execute the roadmap.
Briefly tell us how you got to where you are today, professionally.
I started as a product development manager for a French e-commerce marketplace, PriceMinister.com which later was acquired by Rakuten. I was responsible for the search and browsing experience within the marketplace.
PriceMinister was considered one of the early start-up success story in France, landing a $250 million exit. and many former employees later became founders.
After three years there, I moved to Latin America and started Viajala with my wife and three French co-founders.
What is the most difficult initiative or strategy you've had to implement, and why?
As a first-time founder with no background in the travel industry and no local connections in Latin America, starting the company as a whole was a big challenge. I managed to tackle it by surrounding myself with strong co-founders and a hand of strategic partners including Amadeus and Spanish telecom Telefonica.
What are your top goals for your team?
On the one hand, we focus on growing the volume of travelers searching through our websites through user acquisition and building customer loyalty. There are currently are 1.5 million monthly users searching flights and hotels through Viajala.
On the other hand, we want to list as much relevant travel content as possible to provide the user with great inventory which will help us to monetize our audience. There are currently 40 travel suppliers and OTAs listing their offers in Viajala and we are proud to maintain a 100% retention rate among B2B customers.
What is your ultimate vision in terms of travel tech/distribution? Where does your company, or maybe the industry as a whole, need to go?
An app that searches all the relevant content in real-time and enables one-click-payment is where we’d like to go. Booking a flight ticket or a hotel room should take less than a few minutes.
Also, we’d like to offer a better shopping experience by pushing user-centric recommendations in the same way Amazon does, persuading people to look at the site even if they are not planning to travel. There is an opportunity to create a demand that does not exist at some point through merchandising initiatives.
What sector outside of travel do you think travel has the most to learn from, and why?
Amazon for online shopping experience, especially one-click payment and customer-centric merchandising.
Zappos for the outstanding customer experience and customer friendly policies.
Google for fast search and unbiased organic search results.
We also believe that accommodations data could be more structured, and that airline/airport/destination data and global standards (IATA, ICAO etc) should be available for free through open source database.
Is there any tech product/trend/platform that you think you caught early?
We've successfully implemented a click-to-call model with local OTAs to improve our UX and monetization on mobile. I believe we were the first metasearch to do it. About 35% of our traffic is now from mobile so we need to be able to convert this.
What single innovation/development/process has changed your business in the most in the past 10 years?
Agile and lean product development enables small team like us to compete with large corporations. It’s not a matter of how big you are anymore but how good you are at selecting features and managing scopes, AB tests and iterates.
Usually 20% of the input makes 80% of the output. We make a difference by doing a better selection of our 20%, so while there is no place yet for native apps or meta booking there are lots of opportunities to provide a better search experience.
Also, the cost of technology infrastructure, development and productivity software has decreased so much that it is no longer a barrier to entry. Anyone can pick a pain and build a solution to relieve it.
What do you worry about most during the typical day?
My coworkers’ motivation, our website performance, our partners' integration performance, our cash flow and our next driver for growth.