Yonderbound was founded with the belief that everyone has the right to travel.
The team says it has built the product around this vision and instead of pushing users to book, allows them to plan a trip at their own pace.
The concept comes from the word Yonder, meaning 'at far distance' which it says is central to the mission of enabling people to travel more.
Yonderbound allows users to put together their own Yonderbox (trip planning tool) adding images, links to activities and hotel preferences from a range of more than 380,000 worldwide. The Yonderbox can also be shared via Facebook.
Users also have the option to choose a ready-made/curated Yonderbox offered by the service.
The three-strong leadership team includes founder and chief executive Barbara Muckermann, founder and chief product officer Barbara Biffi and original founder and vice president of strategy Lauren Serrano.
The startup is currently 40% self-funded with the rest made up from angel investors with travel industry backgrounds.
Yonderbound makes money through adding a margin to its hotel inventory.
What problem does the business solve?
According to Amadeus and Phocuswright, the average traveler visits four websites before making the final decision to book their trip. Yonderbound alleviates the hassle of having to go to multiple sites by creating a platform where users can find the essentials they need to plan and book their trip without being redirected to another site.
Our booking engine is also integrated with TripAdvisor, Google Maps and you can even get inspired by browsing the Yonderboxes of other users.
Additionally, most of the other online travel agencies will not save your search if you do not make a purchase. Yonderbound however, saves your last 12 searches so that you can go back to it any time and continue your planning process at your own pace.
Yonderbound will never pressure you into a purchase that you don’t want to make or that you are not ready for. Accessible from any portable device, it is designed to ease the hassle of travel planning and allow you to share different travel ideas with friends or others you are traveling with.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
The idea of Yonderbound came from 20 years in the travel industry, trying to ease the pain of both the suppliers and the consumers, which is why we founded this marketplace and built the Yonderbox.
We had two major challenges. The first challenge was overcoming the fact that in order to build a vision, we needed much more funding than what we (the founders) could put on the table.
So, we had to set out to find enough funds to create Yonderbound. The second challenge was, and still is, the technological aspect. Building Yonderbound proved to be much more complicated than we expected because the model didn’t exist. This created a six-month delay on our initial launch plan.
Why should people or companies use the business?
Currently, Yonderbound offers more than 380,000 hotels worldwide at competitive rates. Yonderbound allows users to custom-build a Yonderbox, a personal, easy-to-use planning tool — similar to a scrapbook — that helps users to properly plan their vacations at their leisure.
Users can build a Yonderbox for each trip they are planning, adding inspirational photos, bookmarking their favorite hotels, adding notes and collecting links to attractions or events along the way.
The service is accessible from any mobile device and also allows users to easily share their Yonderboxes with friends and family on Facebook, to inspire them and allow them to make recommendations. Alternatively, users can search through and pick out perfectly-curated Yonderboxes from a variety of travel experts or other users.
It is designed for constant evolution, relying on the power of its community to continue to grow and define the future of the company. At Yonderbound, you are free to decide where you want to go, with no immediate pressure to book, allowing you to take the time you need to decide and build your dream trip at your own pace.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Yonderbound was built as a digital native brand, so it mainly relies on word-of-mouth and social media to raise awareness. The core marketing engine for Yonderbound is the Yonderfund, a platform built into our website that will fund free trips for our community for the rest of our brand’s life.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In the next year, we see Yonderbound establishing a name for itself in the industry through its community. In the next three to five years, we hope it will become the fastest growing travel websites in the world.
Our goal is to increase our inventory daily and have more and more users sharing, planning and booking their travel dreams through Yonderboxes.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
The current travel industry is full of companies pushing you to buy a product because they want to make a sale. We wanted to create Yonderbound to help people travel more and allow them to plan at their leisure— to explore and get inspired by others.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We have enormous respect for the founders of Maptia because they really try to get people to travel and try to inspire them, which is our mission.
We also really like the way that Gogobot brings together communities of travelers. And finally, we love Pecora Verde, a small excursion website that shows the world through the eyes of a green sheep—it makes us laugh and we love to have a good laugh!
Yonderbound’s mission is to help people travel more, but we want to do this without taking ourselves too seriously!
Tnooz view:
Yonderbound has lots of elements going for it - the question will be whether the team, which has a strong, travel industry background, will be able to bring it all together.
There's the inspirational, Yonderbox trip-planning element which the startup says aims to take a gentler approach than that of other businesses out there. The Yonderbox is interesting because it allows users to save the last 12 searches.
Then, there's the community side of the business and the company recently unveiled its Yonderfund to help people to win money to finance their trips via a voting system. Yonderbound is vowing to plough profits back into the initiative to ensure this happens.
This social element will hopefully have the dual role of creating buzz around the startup as those bidding for funds have to create videos explaining why they should win and are encouraged to share them (and win votes) via Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
This financing element is slightly reminiscent of another startup, Outski, (TLabs here) which also wants to help people achieve their dream trip and is putting money saving schemes in place to achieve this.
Yonderbound will then also organise the winner's dream trip.
It has also just unveiled a partnership with luxury agency network Virtuoso to bridge the online-offline gap for any users who want that option.
Much of Yonderbound's success will hinge on trust as it bids to become one of the fastest growing travel websites in the world in three to five years.
There are many trip planning services with a social element out there, too many to name so the community will be key as will making enough money to keep the Yonderfund initiative going.
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