STARTUP STAGE: MakeYourTripBetter is a collaborative platform connecting travelers with locals

MakeYourTripBetter

MakeYourTripBetter is a free, collaborative platform connecting travelers with locals to get tips and advice and plan experiences.

Founded in 2020, the startup wants to help travelers plan and book responsible and memorable trips. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The startup Partasam is launching MakeYourTripBetter.com to connect travelers and locals. The platform is collaborative, free and allows travelers to get in touch with locals to get tips and advice, and if they wish, they could practice their favorite activities with them.

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

MakeYourTripBetter (MYTB) is, as already mentioned, a collaborative platform. It is a community of responsible travelers where each member is at the same time the traveller and the local. Access is easy and its use is very simple.

MakeYourTripBetter is a multilingual platform, and the already registered members ‐ from more than 25 countries ‐ are present on the platform within six months of existence.

In order to work, all MYTB’s members agree to complete a fairly detailed profile.

The platform offers these members strict respect for their private data. Thus all profiles are anonymous and no personal information (email, address, place and date of travel) is visible to other members or transmitted to third‐parties or companies.

The health crisis linked to COVID-19 has reinforced the desire to travel with more meaning but, also for the moment, severely limits travels and meetings and the possibilities of using the platform.

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

With MakeYourTripBetter we want to help travelers make responsible trips with more meaning. We believe that from the moment the traveler enters into a relationship with the locals, communicates with them, meets them, they become more respectful of the territory and the locals. We also encourage slower, longer and less frequent trips to reduce traveling modes with high environmental impacts.

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

We are already communicating with tourism stakeholders all over the world to establish numerous collaborative and partnership projects. With travelers, we will communicate strongly in 2021 in the media and on social networks, first in France, the country where our company is established. Then we will communicate in neighboring European countries where many inhabitants like to come and visit France every year. Then we will extend our communication country by country.

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

The market that we address is that of advertising for tourist services and activities. We will allow all players wishing to show their ads to our community of responsible travelers.

How and when will you make money?

We will earn money through the sale of advertising subscriptions for terms ranging from one to 12 months. These are the MYTB members who will choose to see the ads, and they will only see ads that are highly likely to interest them.

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

The team is made up of 26 co‐founders. Fourteen men, 12 women aged 30 to 65. All of them have had professional backgrounds in France and abroad. Management, IT development, commerce, finance, risks, quality, etc., each brings their skills and experience to the project.

The president, Olivier Gibouin, trained in project management and an experienced team manager, leads the team of co-founders and solicits them depending on the problem to be solved.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

When we want to talk about diversity and inclusion, the first thing to do is to take it into account when building the team of co‐founders. That's what we did. The origins, nationalities, places of life of the co‐founders are multiple (France, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Russia, Morocco, Brazil, Canada, Caribbean Islands, New Zealand, Germany, Spain).

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

If we put aside the crisis linked to COVID-19, we have not encountered any major difficulties so far; on the contrary we have had very good surprises and a very good welcome from the media and tourism professionals.

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

Our enormous strength is the experience of the co‐founders. We know how to build a network and then mobilize this network around a project. We are not afraid to test, make mistakes, listen and correct. We have shown this in our past experiences in business. We will show it again in the line of this project.

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

In a year, the MakeYourTripBetter platform will have taken off in France and Europe, and we are preparing for fundraising to speed up this development and deploy it everywhere.

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

We are still far from that moment and we do not know yet how far this adventure will take us. We are open to all scenarios.