STARTUP STAGE: Luxury Travel Hackers makes dream trips for millennials on social media

Luxury Travel Hackers

Founded by former film and television producer Gary Kohn, Luxury Travel Hackers wants to provide a one-click booking experience to users. The startup has landed early-stage funding led by a former CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

Luxury Travel Hackers puts together travel recommendations for millennials using social media and video content made with influencers and make trips bookable via social channels.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Luxury Travel Hackers shoots and repurposes travel content with influencers and makes vacations bookable via social media.

What we discovered is that upwards of 80% of all travelers are choosing their next vacation on social media but no one is leveraging this influence and content for booking, so we've created a "One Click Away" solution to get you the vacation you just watched, while turning followers into customers in the process.  

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

LTH is a travel booking platform that generates revenue from multiple sides of what we do. Our MVP being the booking where we convert followers into customers.

We also generate a significant amount of revenue on the content and influence side where we get paid by tourism boards, hotels, vendors, DMC's and big brands when we license, produce or feature their products in our content to our and our influencers followers.  

The technology that we are building will allow for a seamless and easy booking process through a drag and drop system allowing customers to build their trips based on content viewing.

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

• Strengths - Everyone on our team are leaders and experts in the fields they handle within the company. Our access to thousands of influencers across social media based on previous relationships and our ability to produce low cost high quality content. The building of our brand and name will give the company a moat and make it more difficult to duplicate.

• Weaknesses - Getting ahead of the curve in the travel industry post-covid to know exactly where the opportunities are going to be moving forward.

• Opportunities - The travel industry is changing at lightning speed post covid and is ripe for shake-up

• Threats -  To be honest, it's been really hard to determine this as it's not easy for the big brands to capture this model without a major pivot. It seems that it's been easier for the big names to acquire companies like ours so I haven't been able to identify a big threat...and I've tried!

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

When 80% of all travelers are choosing their next vacation on social media they are then spending an average of 7.5 hours of additional research on multiple websites to build the trip they just watched.

We are making that process seamless and fast. And for the industry, our ability to create beautiful content in a story driven format for brands across the industry will allow for higher conversion rates.

For influencers we are solving a very big problem for them, which is how to monetize on the content they've already shot outside of the initial money they make from it, creating a long term passive income revenue source.

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

Through our influencer collaborations and giveaways. We are currently in the process of onboarding hundreds of influencers with a social reach of over 30m, and that's just in the past few months. 

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

I am a former film and TV producer who saw this opportunity and did about 2-3 years of R&D before I decided to pursue it full time.

There are 200 million traveling millennials worldwide - 60 million in the US and 14 million are our target market.

How and when will you make money?

We make money from bookings, tourism boards, hotels, vendors, licensing of content, brand integration and affiliate marketing and our membership model

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

• Gary Kohn - CEO andco-founder - 30 years film and TV veteran who has worked with almost every major studio and network in Hollywood. Spent most of his career in the nuts and bolts side of production where he oversaw all scheduling and budgeting of everything he's produced. He has run teams and productions in the multi-million dollar range in charge of cast and crews of over 15 departments and 200 people.
• Katie Warner - head of travel/co-founder - A former assistant attorney general to the state of Texas who started a travel agency eight years ago where she saw 120% annual growth rate year after year with almost no marketing.
• Brian Hammers - head of production - 15 years experience in content and marketing production and has worked with major brands such as Chevron, Fox as well as celebrities such as Zac Efron.  
• Daniel Lannon - CMO - 15 years experience in marketing and has run dozens of multi-million dollar campaigns.
• Thomas Mangas - lead investor/board member -  former CEO of Starwood Resorts who took it through its exit to Marriot for $13 billion.
  
• Carine Schneider - advisor - former Nasdaq executive.

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

Learning the difference between approaching it as a sprint or marathon. One is sustainable and the other makes you crazy. 

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

I don't think luck has anything to do with it.  Timing, maybe.  I think most travel startups have trouble finding an audience. What makes us able to overcome that is our ability to create a follower and user base with established influencers.

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

I think we will be launching the 2nd version of the technology, we will have sold the TV show version, we will have over 2m followers across social media and will have put a big foothold into the market we are going after. 

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

This is always a question people ask which is so hard to determine but I would say right now it's exit.  However, we could hit that opportunity in 3-5 years and decide based on how fast we are growing that it might make sense to ride it out longer and see if an IPO makes sense.  It would be based on so many factors that are hard to predict.