With trade shows cancelled, travel tech startup takes its show on the road - literally

Darren Dunn, a former senior vice president with ADARA, and Jay Kinghorn, a former marketing executive for the Utah Office of Tourism, launched Entrada Insights in June 2019. The startup is focused on providing a solution the two of them saw firsthand in their prior roles: destination marketing and management organizations struggling with too much data, housed in disparate dashboards, and an inadequate understanding of how to act on it.

“We bring all the data resources of a DMO into one spot ... and we also work with the DMO to set up alerts so if data is going up or down in any kind of significant way, it will alert them. We don’t want them spending a lot of time looking at our platform ... we want the platform to actually be looking out for them,” Dunn says.   

Now one year old and with seed money from a round in February, this was to be the summer for Entrada Insights to accelerate growth by signing new clients to its Destination Intelligence Platform through meetings at industry trade shows.

Then came COVID-19.

“Typically the summer is a very busy trade show season for people in the DMO business. We are at trade shows every other week and that’s where we do a large bulk of our business,” Dunn says. 

“Every single one of them at this point has been cancelled. So that was quite perplexing and unsettling, as a guy who’s been doing this for 20 years.”

Dunn began brainstorming with Dave Bahlman, also a former ADARA executive, who joined the startup June 1. The two had talked of someday doing a cross-country road trip, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. 

On Wednesday, Dunn and Bahlman will hit the road in an RV, starting in San Francisco and ending 16 days later in Maryland, with 42 meetings scheduled with DMO executives along the 4,500-mile stretch. 

“We’ll take the trade show to them,” Dunn says.

“We knew potentially a lot of people wouldn’t be back in their offices yet, so we decided to get an RV, and we will put out the awning and literally set up a trade show booth. Every colleague in the industry that we’ve reached out to has said yes. They are so anxious to see us.”

Along with a driver, Dunn has hired a videographer to record interviews with the DMO leaders about their organizations’ current status and recovery roadmap. 

Bahlman says he and Dunn have also invited their “friends from the publisher and ad agency side” to join them, so over the two-week experience Tripadvisor, Sojern, ADARA, MMGY, Miles Partnership, Longwoods International and Madden Media will have staff participating in the meetings. 

In addition to spurring this rather innovative mobile trade show strategy, Dunn says the COVID-19 crisis has also prompted the company to make changes to its platform that address the “now accelerated” need for DMOs to define their value.

“The funding models for DMOs that existed, which is hotel tax revenue, is basically gone out the door, so they have to actually define how they are meaningful to the community,” he says. 

“Our platform is designed to take in their sales data as well as city data – things like tax data, jobs, unemployment, location data, etc. - so they are quickly able to get a glance at their destination and see what the health is, not only from a marketing perspective but more importantly from a jobs, community well-being standpoint.” 

And to foster community support, Dunn says every DMO they will visit has agreed to put together a gift basket of favorite local items, along with some words of encouragement, that will be given to the next destination on the trip. 

“The spirit of the journey is good,” he says.