We are 15 years into the online travel revolution and travel search is still in its infancy. In a post over at Tnooz I discuss four Australian based start-ups trying to recreate the travel search experience. Check it out
Below is a Q&A exchange with Getflight.com.au founder Ian Cumming (pictured here on stage at WebInTravel). This is an instalment in my profile series on Australian travel search start-ups.
BOOT: Date founded
Cumming: January 2011
BOOT: Name of founders
Cumming: Ian Cumming
BOOT: Name of backers/investors
Cumming: Timothy O'Neil-Dunne (t2impact), Gill Hazel (travel industry advisor), Don Takaya (PR and media relations)
BOOT: How much money have you raised
Cumming: None.
BOOT: Description of the business
Cumming: Multi-channel distribution of sale airfares across web, social and email.
BOOT: What is the revenue model
Cumming: On the B2C side - Affiliate advertising (hotels, tours, car hire), and on the B2B side - Licensing of a white-label solution.
BOOT: Any success metrics you are happy to share (traffic levels, customer numbers, revenue numbers, number of searches)
Cumming: 8,723 alert subscriptions, 52,597 deals found, 268,652 deal alerts sent, 70,972 unique visitors, 47,935 searches to airline websites.
BOOT: Something you learnt along the way
Cumming: Online distribution of airfares is complex and innovation is in a stale-mate with the conversion rate.
BOOT: Something you wish you had done differently in launching a business
Cumming: Launched in an emerging market.
BOOT: What's next for the business. What are you working on that is exciting
Cumming: We are focused on developing a licensing model which allows OTAs to re-brand and integrate the GetFlight technology platform to increase distribution of their inventory and increase user engagement.
BOOT: Favourite non-travel website
Cumming:: readwriteweb.com
Below is a Q&A exchange with Flightfox.com founder Todd Sullivan (pictured here right on Mt Kilimanjaro with co-founder Lauren McLeod ). This is an instalment in my profile series on Australian travel search start-ups.
BOOT: Date founded
Sullivan: January 2012
BOOT: Name of founders
Sullivan: Todd Sullivan, Lauren McLeod
BOOT: Name of backers/investors
Sullivan: Startmate Startup Accelerator
BOOT: How much money have you raised
Sullivan: $25k to fund proof of concept
BOOT: Description of the business
Sullivan: Flightfox is human-powered flight search; we use humans to beat machines. For a finder's fee, flight experts all over the world compete against each other to find you the best flights. Unlike most flight search engines (and travel agents), our experts search all the major airlines, budget airlines, special offers, newsletters, forums, and frequent flyer programmes. They use their many years of flight "hacking" experience to route you through the best cities, get you on the best flights, and save you as much money as possible.
BOOT: What is the revenue model
Sullivan: We take a cut of the finder's fee, but with future investment we'll also generate commissions on flight bookings.
BOOT: Some examples of savings and interesting routings that people have comp up
Sullivan: Our most unusual trip was for a customer travelling with 3 cats. Of course, Expedia and Kayak don't cater to cats, and most travel agents will direct you to the airlines, but on Flightfox, our experts had experience travelling with pets and knew all the tips and tricks. For example, there are strict regulations regarding weather; in winter, many airlines restrict travel for pets. In terms of savings, we've saved people over $5,000 on complicated and premium class trips. Even on short domestic trips, our customers offload the searching to us and have peace of mind that our experts have found you the best price. On our average trip, which visits a few cities internationally, we save customers 27%.
BOOT: Any success metrics you are happy to share (traffic levels, customer numbers, revenue numbers, number of searches)
Sullivan: 5,000+ users and over $30,000 in finder's fees, all in our first 8 weeks since launching our beta product.
BOOT: Something you learnt along the way
Sullivan: Firstly, Startmate is the best decision we ever made. The pace at which we iterate and the access to successful mentors, seems to make start-up success so much more likely. Our other big lessons are all to do with marketplaces. But we're only a few weeks in, so I imagine we've barely scratched the surface.
BOOT: Something you wish you had done differently in launching a business
Sullivan: we'd learned many lessons from a previous travel start-up, so there's nothing significant this time. For example, this time we spent no effort on logos, business cards, company registration, SEO, social media, etc, until we'd proven the concept and had confidence in its sustainability.
BOOT: What's next for the business.
Sullivan: What are you working on that is exciting - we're currently raising a seed round of investment to catapult our growth. We don't necessarily need investment, but we have big plans and want to make the most of the opportunity. Specifically, we have a plan to multiply revenue per customer, but for that we need investment. We have pitch days in Melbourne (27th March), Sydney (30th March), then San Francisco (3rd April) and New York (17th April). Investors are more than welcome to contact us for more info.
BOOT: Favourite non-travel website
Sullivan: 99Designs.com
Here is a Q&A exchange with Adioso founder Tom Howard (pictured right with co-founder Fenn Bailey). This is an instalment in my profile series on Australian travel search start-ups.
BOOT: Date founded
Howard: January 2008
BOOT: Name of founders
Howard: Tom Howard and Fenn Bailey
Both of Melbourne, Australia
BOOT: Name of backers/investors
Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit (Gmail, Friendfeed, Facebook), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, Hipmunk), Stephen Bartlett-Bragg (Qantas, Sabre, EB2) and a handful of other investors from Australia & Silicon Valley
BOOT:How much money have you raised
Howard: $380,000
BOOT: Description of the business
Howard: Adioso is a travel search & discovery site that allows you to:
- search without constraints on dates & destinations ("Sydney to South East Asia late May", or "Brisbane to anywhere under $400")
- 'follow" destinations and search phrases to receive alerts as soon as new inventory is found that matches your interests and budget
BOOT: What is the revenue model
Howard: Initially, commissions on transactions facilitated via the site.
Later, services to airlines and suppliers.
BOOT: Any success metrics you are happy to share (traffic levels, customer numbers, revenue numbers, number of searches)
Howard: We don't consider our traffic particularly boast-worthy at this stage, but our we're approaching 100K visits/month, and we refer about $2million/month in leads to airlines. We're expecting much more rapid growth in coming months once we start rolling out the new features we have in the pipeline.
Our favourite stats are:
- Avg session is > 8 minutes
- Average active visitor worth >$45 in referred airline revenue
- Our user-satisfaction survey told us that 95% of visitors would be at least somewhat disappointed if we didn't exist; 50% of those said they'd be very disappointed.
BOOT: Something you learnt along the way
Howard Travel's an awfully tough business for start-ups as you're up against decades-old technology and business practices. But if you can persist long enough to find a way through, the opportunities are vast and exciting.
BOOT: Something you wish you had done differently in launching a business
Howard: Though a lot has gone wrong, I wouldn't wish it to be any different. We'd be better off if we hadn't taken so long to get our back-end technology working properly, and sometimes I lament the 12-18 months we've been delayed due to going about that the wrong way.
But because of that challenge we've been forced to learn so much more about the fundamentals of the travel industry and of building a great company, and have had to do it on a shoestring budget, so overall we're much better off,
BOOT: What's next for the business. What are you working on that is exciting Howard: Just last week we turned on the new version of our site UI. It doesn't actually have any major functionality over the previous version, but it gives us a platform to start doing a lot more cool stuff.
We're in the process of finishing our new search platform, that will enable us to scale to handle global airline inventory, including full-service carriers via GDSs (to-date we've been limited to low-cost airlines).
We've been trialling a hotel search feature, using HotelsCombined and Airbnb as suppliers, and we'll soon be adding this into the new version of the app.
We've also been trialling our "following" feature, that allows people to subscribe to alerts on destinations, flights, hotels and activities that are of interest, and get highly focused notifications when relevant products and deals become available.
Finally, we've conceived a new approach to browsing, sorting and filtering search results, that is testing very well with users.
We're gearing up to start rolling out these features steadily over the next few months. We're pretty excited to get it all out there.
BOOT: Favourite non-travel website
Howard: HackerNews
BOOT: Where did your name come from
Howard: It was on a brainstorming list that Fenn came up with. "Adios!" seemed to nicely represent the idea of finding a cheap flight to an exotic destination and spontaneously taking off out of town.
We wanted something that was short, had the .com available, and wasn't overly literal like so many travel product names. Most of the discarded options were things like "Save-o-flight". I'm so glad we didn't go with something like that, and I'm surprised even today how many travel start-ups have these kinds of name
Below is a Q&A exchange with Rome2Rio founder Michael Cameron (pictured left with co-founder Bernie Tschirren). This is an instalment in my profile series on Australian travel search start-ups.
BOOT: Date founded
Cameron: September 2011
BOOT: Name of founders
Cameron: Michael Cameron and Bernie Tschirren
BOOT: Name of backers/investors
Cameron: None to date
BOOT: How much money have you raised
Cameron: Nothing, so far we are bootstrapped.
BOOT: Description of the business
Cameron: Rome2rio is a platform for organizing and searching the world's travel information. We have built a unique repository of train, bus, ferry and air routes across the globe. Users of the site can discover how to get to any city, town, or landmark - rome2rio will show several alternatives routes by air, rail, bus, boat and car.
BOOT: What is the revenue model
Cameron: Our consumer site makes revenue through hotel and rental car commissions. We also receive revenue from airline and transport provider affiliate programs. Going forward, we also aim to make revenue through partnerships licensing rome2rio's search technology and transport repository.
BOOT: Any success metrics you are happy to share (traffic levels, customer numbers, revenue numbers, number of searches)
Cameron: In January we recorded our 1 millionth query, and broke 120,000 unique users for the month. We marked this milestone with a blog post.
Something you learnt along the way
We've been surprised by the popularity of rome2rio in India; rome2rio has received more Indian visitors than visitors from any other one country. We believe this is due to a number of factors, including a burgeoning middle class and popularity of rail travel in the subcontinent. Also, rome2rio so far has received most of its visitors from English speaking countries, so we have started work on translating the site.
BOOT: Something you wish you had done differently in launching a business
Cameron: So far, on the whole, we're happy with the approach we've taken to launching rome2rio. We launched the site early, with a minimum viable product, and used lean start-up principles to iterate and refine the product. As the product has developed and gained traction with users, we've now started to focus on the business model.
BOOT: What's next for the business. What are you working on that is exciting
Cameron: We're continuing to add more transport to the site. We recently added trains in Japan and Sri Lanka. Coverage in Australia has been expanded too. We almost have complete rail coverage, so we'll be focusing on adding more bus and ferry routes this year. We also plan to add support for building complex, multi-hop itineraries; a feature that has been requested by several users.
BOOT: Favourite non-travel website
Cameron: Who can go past the amazing digital resource of Wikipedia?
A typical email to me from a start up founder will go something like this