STARTUP STAGE: Travis is a visual, collaborative platform for trip planning

Travis

Travis is an Australia-based startup launched in January 2020 to help users find and share travel experiences.

Consumers can use the service for free, with the option to buy a subscription for access to advanced tools. The company plans to add paid options for travel and tourism brands in the near future. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Travis is a visual, social and collaborative platform making travel planning easy for millennial and Gen Z consumers.

Users can share their own travel experiences to inspire others, discover a personalized feed of travel guides and places, save favorite places in curated moodboards and maps and even add friends to collaborate and plan a trip in one place. We’ve launched in invite-only beta and are inviting new users to the platform in batches, to build engagement and anticipation for users.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Travis exists first and foremost, for the traveler. Key features include: 

• Personalized discovery - Enabling users to discover places you never knew existed by people you trust, with increased personalization and optimization over time.
• Collaborative planning - Providing a single place to curate places to visit - from guides on Travis or from any website - and collaborate with friends to plan and see it on a map.
• Community-generated content - Empowering our community with the tools to share their personal experiences as visual travel guides to inspire the next person.

From this core, Travis extends to support travelers across the on-trip experience, and in turn, creates new opportunities for travel/tourism brands and content creators to better engage with high-intent travelers across the journey.

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

• Strengths: There is no current market leader offering a proposition like Travis, bringing together discovery, planning and collaboration in a well-designed, visual platform to enable travelers to plan trips with more ease and less time. Not only are we designing for the end-to-end traveler journey, we are building a broader ecosystem where Travis facilitates value exchange between travelers, travel businesses and content creators.
• Weaknesses: Maintaining quality and diversity of travel content shared by the community, as we grow. 
• Opportunities: With COVID, there is so much pent-up demand for travel, and both travelers and brands are more open to considering new ways of innovating for the future. In addition, Australia has handled COVID relatively well, and we are now seeing international trips being redirected to domestic destinations.
• Threats: Adapting our plans in line with the unknown and changing external forces in the recovery of the global travel industry.

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

Travel planning is time-consuming and messy - with so much travel content online, across multiple platforms for research, and no one way to bring it all together, easily.

We see this broken digital experience led by the rise of social media in travel, especially in the last five years - where inspiration and information are no longer provided solely by travel experts and publications but by anyone over the internet. However, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are not built for travel and never will be. They’re peer-to-peer and visual, but you can’t map it, plan it out over days or easily make bookings.

As a result, travelers face a broken process from sourcing and saving this inspiration through screenshots, scribbles, Google tabs, to planning it out for a trip on spreadsheets, group chats and maps, and booking platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb. 

On the other hand, this also means that it is harder than ever for travel and tourism marketers to engage with travelers at the right time across their path to purchase, because they are using different platforms for different purposes.

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

We’re doubling down on Australia as our launch market given our ability to start traveling again, before entering other markets. We are constantly expanding our partnerships and working with great content creators. This has been working well so far in creating extremely high-quality, authentic guides that connect with people.

On top of that, our product will have two major viral mechanics built in:

• Collaboration to allow a group of friends to suggest and work on the same travel plan together.
• The ability to turn any website link into mappable places, enabling any traveler to contribute valuable information into the platform for others to discover.

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

This was a problem that our team faced personally, repeatedly. One specific trip in 2019 piqued the obsession to solve this problem, which led us to research and test with over 300 travelers between 25 to 35 years old to realize this wasn’t just a problem for ourselves. 

In fact, there are 370 million millennial travelers globally, with Gen Z as a new generation of travelers not far behind. Three out of five American digital users consume travel content regardless of a trip, and 87% get travel inspiration from Facebook.

From our research, we found it baffling that these digital savvy travelers were still using the very rudimentary Google Map pins and spreadsheet combination, wasting countless hours in their travel research and planning. For many of them, Travis is like “a dream come true.”

How and when will you make money?

While anyone can start to use Travis to discover, plan and collaborate on trips for free, we have paid subscriptions for more planning and collaboration tools for the avid traveler. We will also be introducing business subscriptions within 12 months for travel and tourism brands to connect with creators for experiential content, and brand insights tools.

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

We’re a blended team with expertise across marketing, product and engineering.

Nicole Tj, co-founder and CEO, spent five years at Deloitte Digital leading digital innovation and launching new ventures for Australia’s largest organizations, reaching millions of their customers.

Thomas Lo, co-founder and chief product officer, previously spent four years in award-winning architectural practices including WoodsBagot, designing some of Australia’s most iconic buildings, and 10 years in event experience and creative direction, before focusing on designing digital experiences.

Sylvain Simao, CTO, has been building digital products for 12 years, and was previously technical director at award-winning creative agency Clemenger BBDO, leading teams to build digital experiences for clients like Airbnb, MARS and Australian tourism boards. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Inclusion and diversity are core to Travis’ values.

As a female founder, Nicole Tj is proud that we embody a diversity of cultural backgrounds, career expertise and interest areas within our founding team, having lived and worked across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and France. It’s something that we are proud of and believe it helps us look at things from a different perspective.

We consciously keep this in mind when building our team, conducting design research and user testing, choosing content creators to work with and fostering our traveler community on the platform.

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

Bootstrapped development and beta launch while navigating the challenges that have come with COVID.

In saying that, we’re thankful to currently be part of the Skalata Ventures Seed Investment Program in Melbourne and have a growing travel community - the pent-up demand is huge, and we know that travel will bounce back once it’s safe to do so. After all it is the only thing that you cannot just experience online!

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

We are building Travis to be positioned uniquely across the traveler journey, agnostic of but complementary to tools that travelers use - like Airbnb, Booking.com and so on - so that we fit as much as possible into their behaviors and habits. Think of Travis as the glue helping you bring your inspiration - from anywhere - into one place and giving you the tools to plan and book with this.

We are solving for a pain point we personally face and are designing an experience that we know we will genuinely love. This is something that travelers are crying out for, but no existing incumbent has successfully executed.

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

Travis will be supporting 100,000 avid travelers in discovering, planning and collaborating on their trips - and actually making it fun! We will also have 1,000 businesses on our platform using tools to make it easier for them to drive continuous value from experiential content.

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

Grow and stay private. We’re now focused on reimagining the digital traveler journey - but this is only one piece of the puzzle. We see the potential for this to result in greater shifts across the travel ecosystem and for Travis to pioneer this into the future for consumers.