Startup Stage: Whereo helps hotels drive revenue from experiences

Whereo

Newly launched Whereo aims to help hotels get direct bookings for their experiences and remove friction for consumers.

Whereo aggregates experiences offered by hotels and categorizes them for consumers to search and book.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors and hotel brands?

Whereo makes it easy for travel consumers to discover luxury hotel offers and experiences from brands they know and trust. We’re providing a vetted, more reliable and upscale alternative to travel experiences offered by services like Airbnb and Viator.

Whereo aggregates unique hotel offers and experiences and categorizes them by interest. Some of our categories include safaris, romance, wellness, fitness and foodie experiences. Each category is browsable and searchable to enable experience-first travel.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Business: By their very nature, hotels offer a wealth of experience opportunities. Unlike tour booking platforms, they’re a sleeping giant of travel experiences. Whereo aims to put hundreds of thousands of hotel offers and experiences in one place so consumers can research and discover unique experiences based on what interests them.

Technology: Whereo is not an OTA or metasearch. We’re an aggregator and a directory of offers and experiences that focuses on discovery and awareness. We help our hotel partners get leads into their direct booking funnel as well as reduce the friction consumers typically experience with direct booking platforms: not having a strong sense of what they’re booking before they purchase it. Our platform standardizes nomenclature, tagging, data structure and content for hotel offers and experiences across luxury brands.

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

Strengths

• We’re the only company trying to put all of the hotel experiences in one place, positioning Whereo as an early leader in the “experience” space and enabling our platform to drive standards.
• Our website is visually appealing, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety percent of our development and research is backend tech stack and data that focuses on our core mission of making hotel offers and experiences discoverable and driving leads directly to our hotel partners.
• Whereo is self-funded, which gives us flexibility to focus on the product while remaining adaptable and responsive.

Weaknesses

• We’re the first—and only—company trying to put all hotel experiences in one place. There’s very little validation around whether this has the potential for success.
• Because we’re a newly-launched startup, our brand recognition is limited.
• Whereo relies on unstandardized industry base data and content while simultaneously building another proprietary data silo. It’s a resource drag.
• Initially, we’ll be offering limited pricing coverage. Whereo will display prices when the offer text shows a starting price; once a hotel officially partners with us, we will allow them to enter a starting price for their offers. As partnerships develop, we'll add pricing integration with their backend. Currently, we rely on our partners to approve an unlisted price. 

Opportunities

• To help luxury travel consumers have memorable experiences by making it easy for them to find great things to do from brands they know and trust
• There is a massive catalogue of existing content inventory just waiting to be structured & discovered
• To help put hotels in the driver's seat in the experience economy
• To foster greater enjoyment in their work by helping hotel staff to become “experience enablers”

Threats

• Hotel brands often confuse loyalty programs with awareness; they promote and engage only on their branded platforms, like websites and social media.
• Experience fatigue: Experiences are amazing, but if the industry pushes too hard or too fast, hotel brands will stall experience implementation and partnerships due to fatigue.
• Hotels treat offering experiences as something to check off a list rather than a way to make their properties more attractive and to improve travelers’ interactions with their brand.

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

The transition to “experience” (like, dining) from “things” (like, “a restaurant”) is still relatively new. Consumers don’t know what they don’t know, and Whereo is trying to tackle the gap in awareness of the incredible array of hotel-based experiences.

“Experience” as a travel category is still in its infancy. We’re attempting to standardize what an experience is for a traveler and what the expectations are of the hotel to provide a positive, rewarding experience. 

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

We look at the vast catalogue of hotel offers and experiences as content and storytelling mechanisms. Our go-to-market will focus on leveraging our hotel partner content into platforms and opportunities that expand storytelling reach to more travelers.

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

We’re doing something different, so that’s been really difficult. Consumers have historically chosen travel destinations based on places and things before thinking about what they’re actually going to do when they get there. That’s the mindset change challenge of “experience-first”: convincing consumers to think about the verbs first.

Currently, hotels tout room, restaurant, pool and discounts, but we’re trying to change that to sleeping, eating, swimming and saving. At the end of the day, we believe that travelers looking for something authentic and meaningful will choose experience and memories over things that help them find momentary happiness. But hotels will enable that because they have the infrastructure already in place to execute at scale.

The ubiquitous nature of hotels speaks to the market size and opportunity. We also believe that regulation in the experience space is inevitable and that hotels are ideally suited to respond to an increased regulatory environment—whether that’s quotas to control overtourism or licensing for experience operators, hotels are already well versed in the regulatory and compliance space for other functions.

How and when will you make money?

We want our partners to quickly realize the value of our platform, so we’ll pursue revenues through services and partnerships rather than per-booking revenues. It will enable both Whereo and the experience market to grow faster. Our initial focus is to grow the platform while continuing to build tools that help our partners develop more compelling offers and experiences. Our model looks most similar to Forbes Travel Guide.

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

Whereo was founded by two corn and soybean farmers from Central Illinois with a passion for innovation and creativity. We still actively farm, and when not in the office or traveling and making offers and experiences easy to discover, I’m in a tractor, combine or walking through a field thinking about how to make offers and experiences easier to discover.

Our core business has been software and app development for over 25 years, primarily in the enterprise space, where we support large agri-businesses like John Deere and BASF.

Although we’re new to the travel tech space, we feel our farmer ethics are a perfect fit for connecting with the travel industry.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Mirroring our hotel partners, we recognize the individuality of each member of our team and the power that has to break down walls and build connections. We have a track record of treating our employees fairly and equitably, and we ensure they feel valued. 

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

• Explaining something that’s new and different but that we feel should be obvious
• Not being an industry insider and fostering mutually-beneficial connection
• Convincing hotels and brands that we are different from other travel tech companies and will treat them well—we’re honest. We ask them to be part of the process rather than dictating terms. We design features around them rather than taking advantage of them and don’t misrepresent their offerings as our own.

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

We’re narrowly focused on and obsessed with one thing: making hotel offers and experiences known to the world. Our expertise and the deep knowledge we’ve built in this space is our core offering. That will allow us to grow and thrive regardless of what the product needs to look like or what our partners require. 

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

Making experience-first travel a reality and raising awareness of hotel offers and experiences to a wider audience seeking more fulfilling travel. 

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

We’re open to any path that will help to make Whereo a success, but we’d love to find partners to help us grow the vision as fast as we can!