STARTUP STAGE: GetLost wants to make cheap on-demand travel a reality

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

We are an online travel agency offering specially negotiated flights for last-minute surprise trips and we want to make on-demand travel a reality.

Leveraging our team’s expertise and experience in travel (Adam has visited more than 100 countries, many during long-weekend trips from Stanford and worked for JetBlue), we are applying the principles of HotelTonight to the airline industry to help fill many of the more than 120 million airline seats that depart empty in the United States every year.

Rather than selecting a destination, our travelers choose the theme of their trip, e.g., the Caribbean, where a traveler would visit one of San Juan, St. Thomas, Saint Martin or Aruba, and discover their destination after booking - rewarding their flexibility with a steep discount while helping airlines segment their market, unlock new demand for their seats and improve their efficiency. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We offer surprise trips but give travelers control over important parts of their trip. While personalization is nice, we believe that customization is key. 

Instead of overwhelming our travelers with 15 options, all “just for you,” we can simplify the booking process by allowing travelers to customize the most important parts of their trip (e.g., excluding a destination from consideration and choosing a time-window for their departure and return).

We do this by designing our product to reflect travelers’ priorities based on our own experiences and conversations with hundreds of travelers. 

Rather than offering travelers 30-hour layovers and 3 millimeters of legroom, we exclude ultra-low-cost airlines, ensure that all our fares include a carry-on bag and personal item and limit layovers to one stop for a maximum of 3 hours and 30 minutes. 

Rather than show 150 different hotels, we only show highly rated hotels in desirable locations while emphasizing their most important features (e.g. not whether there is a bowling alley, but whether the hotel has free breakfast, is ADA accessible, etc.).
 
Our approach enables us to work with airlines to identify distressed inventory, and by creating a new sales channel for our partners, we are able to open up affordable seats on flights for flexible travelers and encourage everyone to travel and explore instead of staying home or driving to a nearby destination.

Because the destination is unknown until after booking, airlines can confidently share discounts and seats with us knowing that it will not sacrifice their profits from higher-value business travelers.

As a result, we have a win-win product: Airlines win by making additional profit from empty seats, and flexible travelers win by being able to take last-minute getaways to new destinations at affordable prices.

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

Strengths: Our team’s knowledge of the intricacies of opaque products and the travel industry gives us an advantage as we grow. Distressed inventory in the travel industry is a large and recurring problem that will not go away any time soon (even if we are successful!).

Weaknesses: The online travel space is crowded and dominated by a few major players, making it challenging for new entrants.

Opportunities: Opaque products are versatile and have been neglected for many years. We see a tremendous opportunity to reimagine opaque products as a win-win for travel providers and travelers.

Threats: Acquiring customers as a B2C travel company is expensive. We believe that we can differentiate and grow but doing so in the online travel space will be challenging.

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

For our customers, we make last-minute travel affordable, easy and exciting. Our surprise trips enable them to explore new places without breaking the bank, all without sacrificing quality or convenience.

For our airline partners, we help their revenue management strategy become more efficient and improve their bottom-line by unlocking new demand for flights. For other travel providers (e.g., hotels, experiences), we can provide similar value, bringing flexible travelers to their doorstep.

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

We expect that partnerships with airlines and hotels will help us grow because rather than simply finding last-minute discounts, we are able to make our own exclusive deals.

Since we can offer last-minute getaways more cheaply and reliably than any other company, we think our customers will love booking with us and tell their friends.

We are also running a promotion to celebrate our beta launch, offering a $20 discount on every booking made during our Beta and giving away free roundtrip flights for two to a surprise Caribbean destination.

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

We have conducted over 100 in-person customer interviews, completed two different surveys with 200 responses each, and spoke with numerous airline executives and revenue management experts to help validate our approach to solving this problem of empty seats.

We have analyzed data on millions of flights available through the Department of Transportation’s public database, leveraged analysis from MIT’s Airline Data Project and collected millions of our own proprietary flight data-points on select routes to better understand flight-pricing and availability over time. 

Our own experiences with booking last-minute vacations also informed the urgent need for a solution that can help both travelers and airlines get more value for their money and seats.

We built our product on the back of this data, as well as seminal revenue management research around the power of opaque and surprise products that we believe have been overlooked.

How and when will you make money?

Our business is commission-based, and we will take a small portion of the money generated when we help travel providers sell their distressed inventory.

We are also excited by the opportunity to design custom promotions and experiences to match our customers’ needs. For example, if you have a ski pass for a chain of resorts, we’d love to work with the resorts to encourage customers to try out different slopes instead of going back to their “usual” destination.

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

Adam has visited 108 countries and is a multiple-time world champion bridge player. He graduated from Stanford University with his B.A in Psychology and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering in 2018. Adam previously interned for JetBlue’s loyalty team and has been a travel and airline geek since he started taking long-weekend trips during his freshman year at Stanford.

William is in his last year of studying Computer Science and Finance at New York University. He has experience working as a software engineer for several previous startups and loves traveling. 

We met while working at a previous startup in the blockchain space (where we were the first and second employees) and enjoyed working and building cool things together.

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

Travel is a heavily regulated and complex industry with a lot of deeply entrenched risk-averse players using outdated systems. The sheer amount of coordination and complexity required to take a passenger from point A to point B is astounding.

Many airlines and travel providers only recently joined the 21st century, but it’s exciting that travel providers are now embracing innovation across all parts of their business.

Navigating the unseen quirks of the industry has been a challenging process and building a successful company in a complex industry such as travel requires careful execution.

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

We believe that our timing is crucial – in the past five years, we have seen the rise of remote work, problems with overtourism and a renewed push for sustainability in travel.

Since we are filling seats on planes that would depart with or without our customers, seats booked with GetLost have an overall lower environmental impact and help airlines improve efficiency.

In addition, a recent Expedia survey found that over two-thirds of GenZ and Millennial travelers were indecisive about their destination and that these younger generations of travelers prioritize experiences when traveling.

This generation of truly flexible travelers is growing rapidly, and we are well-positioned to capitalize on this.

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

We plan to have raised a seed round and started a pilot program with a major airline.

In addition to expanding our team, we hope to grow beyond the New York City area and expand the destinations and experiences that we offer our customers.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Selling distressed inventory and surprise trips on rocket ships to Titan, Ganymede, Europa or Mars.