TripAbrood
TripAbood is looking to address the complexities of planning family vacations through an AI-driven virtual assistant.
The London-based startup, which will launch its beta shortly, is built around a recommendations engine that will match families with relevant suggestions.
Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.
TripAbrood is set to reinvent the online family travel experience by developing a virtual family travel assistant.
The artificial intelligence-led travel assistant is focused on tackling the most complex area of online travel - family holidays - and will reinvent the current standard booking flow into a highly personalised discovery journey.
This journey, led by machine learning, will enable TripAbrood to deeply understand the complexities of each customer’s unique interests for their next holiday, and will use an AI-led recommendation engine to match them to the most relevant options.
What inspired you to create this company?
The concept of TripAbrood came from Alexa-Maria Rathbone Barker (founder) in 2018, who struggled to book the kind of holidays that she, her husband and three young children wanted, especially when both her and her husband were working parents.
Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.
The team: TripAbrood’s three co-founders come with a collective 30 years of industry experience in data, technology and online travel.
The product: Unlike other booking sites, TripAbrood’s interactive user journey gets to know each users’ individual travel needs and then applies machine learning algorithms to match users with more relevant hotel options.
The product is not launched in the market yet.
No other travel platform is offering recommendations for family travel in this way – TripAbrood is reinventing the online family travel experience.
Incumbents, like Booking.com and Expedia are the go-to platforms for holidays. However, their business model is reliant on a simplified three-question standard search wizard. The onus is placed on time-starved travelers to comb through search results to find their own travel options.
What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?
- Customers: Booking family travel online is complicated. There are too many stakeholders, each with individual needs and wants. Traditional online companies ask the same three questions (where are you travelling, with whom and when?) and travelers are largely left stranded with an overwhelming list of somewhat non-relevant options to consider.
- Industry: Legacy online travel agencies have built storefronts which are not customized based on user needs (ie family travel). The Head of Revenue at a key hotelier specializing in family travel has said that TripAbrood “is the 1st technology led company to approach them about solving the problems associated with family travel”.
TripAbrood is building a family travel assistant from the ground up. The new product will use an interactive user journey to help time starved travelers discover more relevant options that more closely match their unique travel needs.
So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?
Having a co-founder who is the former vice president global brand marketing at Expedia, TripAbrood is well positioned to employ a robust and innovation experience marketing approach to compete in this market place.
There is already a following on social media, including a user-base who has beta tested the experience and has provided positive feedback.
Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.
The global family travel market is worth over $429 billion. TripAbrood has beta tested the experience to validate its hypothesis that customers are willing to invest the time to participate in an interactive tool in order to better match their needs with hotels.
How and when will you make money?
Funding round is now open. TripAbrood’s new product is set to launch Spring 2020.
What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?
Alexa’s founding team brings together more than 30 years of experience from industry leading technology companies, with extensive expertise in tech, travel and data, and a single focus of creating a truly online travel agent focused on families.
Ketan Anand is a technology leader with experience in both start-ups and large enterprises, most recently as an Engineering Lead in Lloyds Banking Group, which has more than 30 million customers.
Being a Dad of a two-year old, he wants to leverage his expertise at building scalable solutions and growing high-performing teams to create an industry-leading platform that transforms how families travel, leveraging data insights, seamless user experience and AI.
Vic Walia brings a wealth of travel industry and brand building experience to TripAbrood, having spent the past 12 years in online travel, most recently as vice president global brand marketing at Expedia Group.
While working at Expedia Group, Vic was also responsible for scaling the Hotels.com business. Vic is a father of two and knows first-hand the struggles that families face.
He brings his OTA expertise to TripAbrood with a mission to make family travel as frictionless as possible.
Alexa’s own experience is from Bloomberg, the world’s leading financial data provider, where she worked for 10 years, most recently as the European head of analytics.
She ran $200 million+ revenue generating businesses that sold data-driven technology solutions to the world’s largest financial institutions.
Alongside this, she has sat on the board of several children’s welfare charities.
Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?
The travel sector has had little innovation in the last decade compared to other sectors.
We feel with our experience in data, tech and online travel, we are in a position to bring needed disruption to the industry.
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