WhereisWhere is a map-based tourism marketing platform enabling businesses to load and manage their content on the site and directly connect with travellers.
The Singapore-based business is currently signing up tourist boards and other travel businesses ahead of its planned consumer launch in the middle of 2016.
Q&A with its founders:
What problem does your business solve?
The travel industry is a highly fragmented market, with businesses marketing and distributing through multiple channels, lacking a cohesive strategy. When it comes to distributing through middlemen, branding is lost as businesses are sold by a single factor – price.
We believe that marketing businesses by the value of their location is better than competing on price; except there are no existing channels which allow them to do so. As an interactive map-based platform, WhereIsWhere enables businesses to re-establish the value of their brand, products & services by marketing themselves directly to travellers.
Our interactive map, which consolidates content (pictures, videos and more) from everyone in the industry - tourism boards, attractions, hotels, tours and services - works like a location marketing tool, allowing participating businesses to update their content.
For the end-user, when it comes to travelling, they often lack an easy way to understand the world. Finding inspiration and information about their next holiday can be quite a nightmare. As content is organized by locations, filtered according to their relevant interests, WhereIsWhere provides them with an easy-to-use user interface that lets them explore new locations and discover hidden experiences.
Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff?
Terence Mak, chief executive
Joanna Loh, content manager
Michelle Ho, global sales manager
WeiJiunn Tan, operations manager
Eileen How, marketing manager
Eric Wong, technology director
Funding arrangements?
We are privately funded at this stage and are currently looking to raise Series A funding.
Revenue model?
CPC and CPM
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
At present, there are many travel-related websites and platforms available, each covering a different sector of the industry. The pain that customers face is maximising awareness of their business, doing so by advertising on as many platforms as they can afford. Moreover, many of these advertisement modules are not even geo-targeted, lowering returns on advertisement dollars.
The WhereIsWhere platform consolidates content from every sector of the travel industry, from hotels, to tourism boards, to food and beverage etc. This means, we will be able to draw a larger audience, thus maximising viewership for each of our advertising customers.
Our advertising module is also geo-targeted, which means we deliver customised content to different audiences, based on their original location and their destination of interest.
The mechanics of our advertising module ensures better conversion rates as travellers are already looking in a specific area that the advertiser is operating in, and would have also pre-selected relevant filters of their interests.
Therefore, advertising customers will get a higher return on their investment.
Tnooz view:
This is an interesting but huge undertaking - a sort of map-based travel and tourism search engine. There are quite a few map-based businesses out there already but the majority are sector specific or functionality within a wider site.
The filtering elements of the service will be hugely important if WhereisWhere is to be truly relevant to travellers, otherwise it just becomes a listing service.
Attracting consumers will require a lot of marketing dollars but perhaps the various partners signing up can help there with cross-promotion.
And, allowing partners to manage their content could work in the startup's favour if travel-related businesses and tourist boards keep images and text fresh, inspiring and of good quality.
What perhaps hangs over all of this is the G word. Google is already serving up huge amounts of travel information via its various channels - Hotel Finder, flights and more recently its Destinations content for mobile - and much of it is integrated with maps.
And, let's not forget Waze, also owned by Google and is more of driving companion, which brings in the crowd-sourcing social element and is also beginning to suggest restaurants and other facilities as you get near.
Looking forward to the public launch of WhereisWhere later this year and to seeing its traction within the industry.