STARTUP STAGE: Voyagu is a new OTA that provides dedicated advisors

Voyagu

Voyagu is a travel management platform and marketplace that connects travelers with advisors that provide service throughout a trip.

Founded in 2020, the company provides guidance with selection and booking of air travel, hotels, ground transportation, travel insurance, restaurant reservations and experiences.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Voyagu is a Uber-like travel management platform and marketplace connecting clients with travel advisors and suppliers to pay less, get more organized travel and have quick access to human support. Our machine learning-based search engine provides clients with personalized offerings 35% cheaper than online prices. The platform also backs the automation of post-booking and workflow effectiveness to free up time for the travel advisor to provide better client support and empathetic problem solving.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Our business is a marketplace for travelers, travel advisors and travel suppliers. The travelers receive savings, easier travel management and customer support, and the travel advisors and travel suppliers get increased earnings and commissions. 

We are building a travel management platform with an ML-based search engine to find the best deals and save money for the clients. The search technology and automated trip management are our key focus for platform development, allowing the agent to work with more clients and get higher earnings and travel suppliers to sell unoccupied travel inventory, redistributing travel demand and supply.

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

• Strengths
  • Effective in-house client acquisition
  • Repeat bookings due to personalized offerings, quality of client experience and client care
  • Profitable bootstrapping
  • Fast decision-making based on data and analytics validation
  • Direct access to client and industry insights
  • Strong focus on financial and business metrics
  • More competitive price offers with ML-based search engine and wide travel offerings
• Weaknesses
  • Bootstrapping can limit funding growth
  • Self-developed tech products are in the early stages
  • “Young brand” with low brand awareness
  • Historical focus is on air travel
• Opportunities
  • Ready to grow with the booming market
  • Accelerating performance of key business metrics by building brand awareness
  • Extending product portfolio to hotels, cruises, tours and other travel products
  • Attracting external funding
• Threats
  • Aggressive response of competition 
  • Macro risk influencing travel industry can impact bootstrapping dependency on revenue

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

From the customer standpoint: The client is compromising either on price, quality of service or both. The pricing of travel offerings is not transparent, which makes trip planning difficult and confusing. Additionally, the client has limited access to and slow responses from the travel provider for post-booking support, changes, cancellations and especially problem solving for time-sensitive issues like lost luggage or missed connections. Instead of excitement, travel brings dissatisfaction and uncertainty with too many variables and no single point of contact to resolve potential problems.

For the industry: The process of joining the industry is complex and requires familiarity with dated systems and tools like the global distribution systems. Though it takes time, it’s still possible to learn these tools and become a travel agent. However, the agent’s inability to gain travel expertise and effectively handle all of the necessary steps for booking and problem solving makes clients hesitant to delegate the booking and management of trip itineraries. 

There is also inefficiency in distribution and use of the travel inventory. The airlines are aiming at higher margins, which translates to higher flight prices and low seat occupancy. This unoccupied inventory is thrown at the travel agents with time-sensitive promotions and special deals, but it is often missed by the slow reaction times and hours of manual search required of the agents. 

Another margin-increasing strategy is cost-cutting in customer support departments, which results in limited access to a reliable point of contact for timely resolution of travel issues and emergencies. 

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

First, our in-house digital marketing team has extensive experience with client acquisition and effective utilization of digital tools. Additionally, we’re committed to keeping the focus on providing top-tier customer care throughout every step of the client’s journey. This has kept our customer satisfaction scores high, and it encourages repeat bookings and word-of-mouth referrals to friends and family.

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 size of the travel agency sector in the United States fell to $20.69 billion in 2020, down from the previous year's total of $56.96 billion. In 2022, it bounced back up to $47.9 billion due to countries lifting travel restrictions and travel companies resuming their operations, addressing the high traveling demand. 

We used the previous experience of the initially founded travel agency to define customer needs, gaps in travel agent performance and ways to improve the interactions with our travel inventory suppliers. A lack of technology was evident. Historically, the travel industry functions on quite old systems, so we saw an opportunity to develop an ML-based platform to bring significant improvements. 

In our NPD (new product development) process, we have ongoing direct conversations with our clients and travel agents to collect insights and complete proof-of-concept testing for customer development. It also helps that we are data nerds, fully equipped with collected data and analysis to validate actual product performance. 

The ambition is to be above 500,000 clients with a minimum of two bookings per year. We are confident we can reach this target before the five-year mark.

How and when will you make money?

We are a bootstrapping company, so we’re already profitable by earning a commission from the travel suppliers. The growth of our revenue is reinvested in the continuous development of technology. In the future, raising more funds will accelerate our success.

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

Our core founding team has a combined industry experience of about 15 years across different travel segments. We have established direct contacts and personal relationships with all key travel suppliers. This allows us to have contracts with access to the widest global travel inventory and power to negotiate exclusive offers. As a travel tech company, we are constantly looking for the unique skill sets of tech specialists around the world. For example, our head of engineering is an ML genius who created his own cutting-edge startup with ML technology.

Additionally, our product development team is made up of the best product professionals in Eastern Europe. Their knowledge and ability to deliver fast product releases gives us advantage in speed to market and first mover advantage with some self-developed technology. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We have been an international company from day one. Historically, we have our roots in Kyiv, Ukraine, and we’ve naturally embraced diversity and inclusion by giving career opportunities to talent from Ukraine and across Eastern Europe. Now, we have a travel tech team around the world from 17 countries who speak a minimum of 10 languages. 

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

The COVID-19 pandemic for sure. We were very brave with the decision to start development in the summer of 2020. As a bootstrapping company during a period of restricted travel, there were limitations. However, we were able to optimize and manage our resources successfully to be ready for the travel comeback and launch of the new platform in 2022.

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

The type of impact we’re making is directly leading to radical change in how the travel industry operates. We’ve created something that solves many of the most obvious and frustrating problems travelers face, and it makes the travel experience better for everyone involved. We’re changing the travel industry from stressful, overpriced, non-transparent, ineffective and impersonal to a simple, exciting, smooth and friendly client service that’s also more profitable for agents and travel suppliers. For us, it’s less about luck and more a result of our fact-based, data-driven approaches. We see industry behind the scenes and are able to apply technology, human expertise and empathy to make the change.

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

Our expected indicators by the end of 2023:

• Double-digit millions-USD gross revenue (GMV) 
• Triple-digit number of travel agents operating the platform

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

Going public. We believe in our mission and will become a strong player in the travel industry. Our company has defined a long-term growth strategy, and we are moving forward with it.