STARTUP STAGE: Roam Around uses ChatGPT to tailor free travel itineraries

Roam Around

Built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Roam Around claims to be the world’s first viral AI travel planner, crafting free personalized itineraries for its users.

The company’s revenue comes through commissions from the business Roam Around drives to its partners.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

With over 4 million itineraries generated in its first month, Roam Around is the world’s first viral artificial intelligence travel planner, forever revolutionizing the way people plan their trips. The days of spending weeks tediously planning trips are long gone. Now, simply enter any destination on Earth, and Roam Around will generate a tailor-made itinerary within seconds. Our platform learns your preferences, interests and budget to create personalized itineraries that cater to your unique travel style - whether it's summiting Kilimanjaro or lounging poolside, traveling solo or with family. We're bringing the luxury of customized trip planning, once reserved for the ultra-wealthy, to everyone. Just as Uber brought chauffeurs to the masses, Roam Around is putting a personal travel agent in every pocket.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Roam Around is in the business of saving travelers time and money. Our platform is free for end-users, and we generate revenue through commissions from our partners for the business we bring to them. From a technology perspective, Roam Around is built on OpenAI's ChatGPT. We incorporate a feedback system where users can rate activities with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, enabling us to learn about their preferences. This data is used to fine-tune our models and adapt to travelers' habits and interactions with AI systems. With over 5 million itineraries and interactions, our model is set to become increasingly travel-specific, ensuring that future recommendations are bespoke to individual user needs based on their feedback history. Add to that the data we share between major players in the space, and you can envision a not-so-distant future where we’re able to provide truly personalized experiences for each traveler.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths:

Team and focus: Our team is made up of five individuals obsessed with making this shared vision a reality. We’ve been delivering at breakneck speeds, and we’re only accelerating. We’re completely self-funded, which allows us to experiment, take risks and make decisions that ultimately benefit the traveler but may temporarily hurt our bottom line.

Virality: Our early success in generating viral attention has provided us with sustained traffic, allowing us the freedom to experiment with innovative ideas. It also gifted us with a plethora of feedback, which we’re incorporating into each new version.

Partnerships: We’ve been fortunate to strike partnerships with some of the biggest online travel agencies in the space, partly because they’re very interested in what we’re doing, and partly because we were so persistent, they realized it would just be easier to agree to partner with us.

Weaknesses:

Size and resources: As a young, self-funded company with only five employees, we face limitations in building and implementing all the features we envision at the desired speed.

Opportunities:

Untapped market potential: Travel is a trillion-dollar industry ripe for AI-driven innovation. While other sectors have embraced AI, the travel industry's transformation has been delayed due to COVID. The opportunity to enhance the travel experience is enormous, and we aim to uncover the hidden gems in lesser-known cities and locales, rather than simply improving on existing platforms.

Threats:

We’re still so early in the AI space. It seems like every week there’s a new, groundbreaking, life-changing advancement. Several large OTAs are already experimenting with ChatGPT plugins, and at the surface level those are threats, but we’re not looking at it like that. Ultimately, we always plan to be an experience layer to AI, so we’ll use all levers at our disposal, including plugins, partners, whatever else the future brings us, so long as they improve the user experience. We’re already seeing several competitors giving up due to perceived threats from various AI advancements or new competitor entrants. We’re taking a different approach; every new feature, every new competitor, every new advancement only benefits our end game of creating truly magical travel experiences. Bring ’em on!

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

User: On average, it takes 30 hours to plan a vacation. Once you’ve completed the laborious planning, you then suffer through the fragmented booking process where you’re entering your passport, billing, email, and other personal information 10 to 20 times throughout the course of a single trip. The future of travel is “I want to visit X city,” and Roam Around says, “Here is an itinerary I built just for you and it includes X activities, Y flights/hotels details, Z restaurants reservations,” to which you reply, “OK, book it.”

Industry: Unless you’re paying a personal travel agent, much of travel has been commoditized. Everyone is seeing the same main attractions and posting the same pictures to Instagram. We’re not suggesting that you skip the “holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa” picture. We’re merely saying, we know there’s an incredible hole-in-the-wall pasta spot not too far away. … Why not go there after a long day of straightening old buildings?

At a higher level, we think there’s a discovery + matching problem that the industry hasn’t quite figured out. On the discovery level, we think there’s an opportunity to serve the long tail of cities. NY Times’ 36 Hours in _, or Conde Nast Traveler, and thousands of other blogs, have already covered Paris, Rome and Manhattan ad nauseam. But on Roam Around, you can get a really detailed itinerary for Pavagada, India, or Clarksburg, California, or literally thousands of other cities the average traveler hasn’t heard of. One of our favorite things to do is watch the “Recent Searches” tab on RoamAround.io, just to learn about new cities people are traveling to.

But even for the top cities, there’s still the matching problem. You and I will want to experience these cities differently. We have different budgets, different interests, different desires. So why is every itinerary static? Ideally, if 10 people search for Manhattan, they will see 10 different Manhattan itineraries, each one bespoke to their needs. 

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We’ve already gone viral, and in the last 60 days we’ve generated over 5 million itineraries. We think this is a testament to the compelling product we’ve created. Suddenly, with the click of a button, anyone can travel like a local. We’re seeing that people love using our product and feel compelled to share it with their friends and family too. These evergreen testimonials are bringing excited new users to the platform, simultaneously expanding Roam Around’s customer base and establishing our name recognition in the public lexicon. There’s also a lot of discovery going on, where users are exploring their options and searching multiple cities back-to-back. We think that’s a good thing and love that many of our users, for example, don’t want to spend their trip just in Paris, but would like to pop by Strasbourg to get the feel of the quaint side of France as well.  

We currently have over 100,000 users and 90,000 newsletter subscribers. These are users who are interested in both travel and AI, and we plan to generate travel content that is both relevant and useful for them.

Shortly we’ll be integrating the social side of travel, overlaying user-generated content on top of our itineraries so you can see where your friends traveled and what they most recommend. At the end of the day, what truly matters is authentic connections, and your social graph is the best way to unlock those further personalized aspects of travel.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Roam Around is built on the idea that every traveler can have the luxury of one-stop, concierge-style service, tailored to each individual preference. The exciting thing about Roam Around is that it can suit every traveler, no matter their trip duration, how far they’re going, the style of travel, or the circumstances of their trip. Because it’s free to use (and with our expanding array of trusted B2B partners), any person, anywhere in the world, will be able to have Roam Around plan their trip – an indicator of our addressable market potential in travel’s trillion-dollar industry. Further, we’re not just focused on long-term travel, but rather local activity planning too. Many startups have tried and failed to answer the question of “What’s going on in my city this weekend?” We think that AI is the secret sauce to finally answer this question.

How and when will you make money?

We’re already making money! We’re free to the end users, but our partners pay us a commission for all the business we bring to them. In the last 60 days, that was over $300,000 in bookings. Again, we think this is a testament to the value and experience we’re bringing to our travelers.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Shie Gabbai (CEO) is a 10-plus-year veteran in customer experience. Prior to Roam Around, he was at Google, Disney and Strike.

Hassan Syed (CTO) was previously a machine learning engineer for Google. Before that he worked on cloud at Microsoft and Amazon.

Doni Goodman (CCO) has 15 years of branding, design and creative direction experience. He’s worked on campaigns for Google, Nestle, Pfizer and many other Fortune 100 companies. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Roam Around welcomes team members from all backgrounds and experiences, and we foster a company culture that is welcoming and respectful. Our platform is accessible to users around the world, and we seek to collaborate with organizations that drive positive impact and inclusion for all.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Keeping up with our ambition. We have an ever-present sense of urgency because there’s so much we want to accomplish, but working 16 hours a day can be both exhilarating and exhausting.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

The combination between the timing and the team we’ve put together is a perfect recipe for success. The travel experience is ripe for innovation, and with all the ChatGPT plugins created by Expedia and Bookings Holdings, the building blocks are in place to make it possible to provide seamless planning and booking. But our true key differentiator is our obsession with customer experience. As an example, we’re a very young team and every dollar of revenue counts. Yet, we recently deactivated one of our partners because it was creating a clunky experience. Taking our ferocious build rate and customer experience obsession and extrapolating that out six, 12, or 18 months, we think you’ll find it isn’t luck that determines our success.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

At the rate we’re innovating, by the end of year travelers will be able to speak to Roamy (our AI bot) the way you would Alexa or Siri, and say, “I want to travel to X,” and Roamy will suggest, plan, and book the perfect, bespoke vacation for them. Two years from now, Roamy may even proactively suggest the perfect vacation based on the user’s previously planned trips.

What is your endgame (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

We’ve said this since Day 0: Roam Around is an experience layer to AI. Our North Star is always going to be customer experience, and we’ll allow that to dictate what products we build next, and how we run our business. Our long-term goal goes far beyond itinerary planning - we want to own the end-to-end experience of travel.