Never consider a travel planning startup
tnooz.com
tnooz.com
A) Sexy - the idea of running a travel startup sounds exciting. It feels like an opportunity to periodically escape from the humdrum life of staring at a computer screen in the office all day, while still doing what you're best at.
B) A broken business - travel booking, planning etc is very confusing and flawed in many ways
C) A "big pie" to take a bite out of - it's a multi billion dollar market, so there must be opportunity in there somewhere.
The problem is, every tech entrepreneur has these same thoughts, and everyone has tried to execute on them at one point or another. It's a ridiculously competitive market, and for the most part the big $$$ for revenue are locked up by monolithic travel booking networks, that are only willing to relinquish a teeny tiny piece of the travel $$ pie to newcomers.
Then drop in this hard truth - recreational travel isn't actually all that commonplace amongst average people. The average joe goes on one or two major vacations in their entire life. So if you want to make money, you need to cater to either travelers with a lot of disposable income (the wealthy or retired), or business travel. Those niches are already very crowded but dominated by big, established, aggressive players, that you and every other dreamy-eyed tech entrepreneur eventually have to compete with for attention.
It's a long, nearly impossible battle to wage for anyone who hasn't spent their life in the industry. Winning in that space is a war of attrition competing with businesses with decades in the travel field, all in hopes of this grand and naive vision of striking it rich while on permanent vacation. Unwinnable. The white whale.
Do I get showered with VC money now, or is there something else I need to do?
"Someone" ought to make a list of the white whale ideas. Not that nobody should ever try one, but I firmly believe that if you're going to try an idea that has been tried a lot already you should go in with eyes wide open.
Or see here: http://en.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=white%20whale
Ahab sacrifices everything in his mad pursuit. Moby Dick ends up sinking the ship, killing his crew, and Ahab himself. It cost him everything for something that was foolish.
Maybe the moral of the story, try a travel startup, but be willing to pivot.
There are exceptions. That's why I don't phrase this in terms of "never ever try". I say you ought to go in with eyes wide open. Look at what has failed, see why, see if you've got a story that you can do better. It's basically very, very expensive market research that you can get for free. If you then want to put your money on these numbers and spin the wheel, at least you did your due diligence and hopefully maximized your chances.
bwahahahaha, are you for real?
I disagree with this blanket statement. Slack may fix the fact that people are bad at using email at work, but it's not going to let me carry on irregular correspondence with old friends and family, and it won't let people send me receipts, bills and newsletters.
(But, sure, as a blanket statement it misses a lot of important details.)
Let's hope not. It's not the e-mail that needs fixing, it's the whole rest of the Internet. E-mail is one of the few things that have not yet been captured and walled up by private companies. Slack "fixing" (i.e. killing) it would be a very bad thing for humanity.
But neither of these businesses leads to "sticky" customers: people don't travel frequently enough to develop brand loyalty to a travel site, and for a dating site, the ideal scenario for your customers is that they find someone and stop subscribing to your site. This is the kind of business problem that's not readily apparent until you start to dive into the customer lifecycle and personas.
As a result, dating and travel sites are essentially branded experiences where the only difference between many of them is the advertising.
e.g. Concur buying TripIt (which isn't as good as it could be but I still find it invaluable). And, having said that, I still just use the free version.
(A "find overlapping travel plans" is one of the few social networks I actually would use, but I can see why it isn't viable on its own)
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/15/the-curse-of-the-network-ef...
> Then drop in this hard truth - recreational travel isn't actually all that commonplace amongst average people. The average joe goes on one or two major vacations in their entire life.
is similar to what sama said about why his local startup (Loopt) failed[0]:
> Most people are too boring I think--they're at the same places most of the time.
0: https://www.producthunt.com/live/sam-altman#comment-208794
There is a small site that maintains an event calendar for my city, oriented towards a certain subculture. That's by far the best thing I've seen for discovering new things to do.
I don't know if there's an actual business model in any of this. That's definitely the hard part. But it would be such a useful resource.
[0]www.DanceDeets.com
-_-
When you learn how to force people to check-in to a club and broadcast it, you'll have this app. Until then, it's really difficult.
I once had an idea was that you would open up the app and it would have two buttons: (1) MALE (2) FEMALE. Clicking one would check you into that club. This would solve what a lot of people want -- where are the people & who are those people?
Even something that simple though -- what's the reward for the user checking in? On Foursquare, it was awards and badges and stuff. If you could do that around night-life, you might have something.
> Then drop in this hard truth - recreational travel isn't actually all that commonplace amongst average people. The average joe goes on one or two major vacations in their entire life.
The vast majority of people who go on a vacation, especially with children, just get into a car they own and drive there, typically to a place they are familiar with for some historical reason like family, etc. There just aren't that many variables involved.
Either way these types of middle-class family vacation package trips are pretty well locked up online by the likes of Expedia and big corporate partners who have a lot of volume resale power like Costco. The remaining sliver of the family travel market - wealthy people & retirees - are actually still mostly the domain of the legacy travel agency business. Licensed travel agents not only still exist, but they're thriving in some cases. And get better commission $$ per sale than integrating with an affiliate partner, to boot.
The ironic sad reality is that anyone thinking of making a living running a travel app/site, is probably much better off getting travel agent certification instead...
Even if it's not traditional legacy travel agents, you also have all manner of adventure travel and similar organizations that will arrange private small group trips. Ultimately, if you're doing something complicated and obscure, dealing with an experienced human is often the best thing--even if it flies in the face of "do everything in software" which is SV's answer to everything.
That might be true for the US, but it is def. more common in Europe, where people go on trips every summer.
Question is, is it enough to support a business model? Popular services tend to ones where the user's return on a regular basis, not where they check in every now and then if they even remember it exists.
There's a reason why so many people in Hollywood are working low paid jobs with the aspiration of becoming an actor or actress at some point in the future. Or why sites like Youtube are littered with the attempts of becoming the next big thing by hundreds of thousands of creators and small teams/companies. Or why every video game market in existence is filled with tons and tons of indie games of every possible level of quality.
All those things are seen as glamorous, have huge multi billion dollar markets and have flaws people think could be fixed in some way or another.
And yet again, they're all ridiculously competitive, are incredibly hard to make a decent profit in and then have the added problem that the product is extremely easy for people to avoid paying for.
Hire a competent (and preferably multilingual) salesperson to approach regional tourist boards. After securing your first contract, develop your travel planning app as white label product and sell to other regional tourist boards. There are plenty of them, and they spend a lot of marketing dollars, usually subsidised by the regional government.
You won't be a "unicorn", but you also won't be battling deep-pocketed giants over paid search or juggling hundreds of distribution relationships. (Your clients will, but it's their raison d'etre and they're not expected to turn a profit)
I invariably end up searching for options across several sites, manually checking directly with specific airlines and hotel groups I know, reading reviews from across the web, etc. Once I've done all of that legwork to find the absolute best flights and hotels for my needs, why would I go back to some aggregator site to book? I'll just book directly.
This of course takes me a LOT of time, and if there were a way to reduce the time consumed, I'd do it. But only if it got me the exact same result, and I can't see how a commission-based travel planning site could effectively replicate that process.
By my calculations, something like 10% of all the people at that party were working on a fucking travel wiki. That's kind of a microcosm of Silicon Valley, in general, but yeah...travel seems like a weird black hole for entrepreneurs.
Not that weird at all actually -- it's an easy to understand business with an overly-complex buy flow they think they can fix. It's the kind of problem that many entrepreneurs are likely to have run into themselves and said "Well I can do this better".
Hear, hear. This gets lost oftentimes when you hear the whole "build something people want" mantra.
Which is what I think when I hear $2B in Priceline advertising per year, etc.
Unfortunately, good mechanism design is one of the least important factors for whether or not a dating app succeeds - what is important is whether or not you can convince people to use it.
Finding someone you want to be around is such a complicated thing. Speaking as a dude, what these dating apps all get wrong is I don't want someone like myself. Yea, I verbalized I want this quality, and this, but in the end; I really don't know what I want. People change. People are not their profile.
The long term relationships, I had, were with people who were my exact opposites. People I thought I would have nothing in common with.
When I walk into a room, I just know who I'm drawn to. It has nothing to do with looks. It's just feeling I get. I don't think an app will ever replace this evolutionary mechanism.
Plus, some people just photograph horridly. I'm a Photographer, and there's people who photograph well, and there's people that don't. If I'm doing a free photo shoot, and the model is only going to pay for sent head shots. I always ask for a candid picture of the future client before I shoot them. Before I waste a day shooting them, I want to see if they have a chance in hell of getting a job in the future. (I make money off the sent head shots. Free studio time, but they don't get the negatives/RAW files.) Some beautiful people in person--just photograph horridly.
You are an outlier as far as research on attraction. Studies show that people are attracted to very similar people on all dimensions, except for the opposite sex.
Maybe there needs to be "The Opposite" dating app:
George Costanza Does The Opposite
I don't know, we could probably get pretty close with machine learning and enough data.
http://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-c...
This is the big takeaway from this article for me. In fact I think this whole article is great if you are trying to build a new way to do something in an established market.
We aren't in the travel space, but we are in the retail home goods space, which is arguably even more established. It follows the same pattern: 1-2 times a year someone needs something and it's a fairly large purchase.
We learned early on that the most important thing is getting in with manufacturers and having them promote us.
A white-label/tech-vendor strategy works if your product is indeed relevant within the incumbents’ offering, hard-to-build, reasonably easy to integrate and doesn’t step on too many toes.
Man that hits home
"The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users."
Unfortunately for consumers, it seems that the user experience is stuck in 2007. I still can't find a good app which allows me to plan a full trip at once, especially when I haven't entirely decided where I want to go yet. As someone who travels about once a month, I'd love to see something better than Kayak.
* Planning the trip: Someone who has expertise in all the sites, options, services, loyalty programs, hidden-city fares, likely delays, smaller nearby airports, fare-tracking, best seats on the plane, best hotels, etc.; who learns my preferences; and who then books everything for me, with absolutely minimal time and effort on my part. I don't want to look through all the sites and gather the options; it seems like a waste that so many people spend so much time gaining a little expertise in the nightmare of travel booking.
* During the trip: Monitor their customer's trips for delays, cancellations, etc., find out before everyone else (i.e., while seats on the next plane still are available) and respond appropriately (find alternative flights, rebook, reschedule ground transportation, obtain refunds, etc., or simply update me). I just want a text message telling me the new plan, or if absolutely necessary, a couple of options.
* At the destination, some concierge service: I need dinner delivered, food waiting in my hotel fridge, a tennis game Wednesday morning, a doctor, another shirt, a bar showing the game back home, etc. It's time consuming to do all that in an unknown town and time is more constrained due to the usually crowded schedule of a traveller.
Every time I have to deal with this stuff, I think about how someone who developed expertise in it would be much more efficient. Just getting to know the resources well would be a big advantage.
As for tech: An app that displays and syncs your current itinerary (including delays, etc.) with the vendor, and with a prominent 'Talk to me!' button that opens an immediate video chat: A friendly, helpful face in a crowded, strange airport, amid cranky flight attendants, during a frustrating trip would make customers very happy. They might pay for that alone.
In general, you shouldn't create start-ups in markets with high barriers of entry. However, the fun part of start-ups is learning how to cleverly bypass barriers while building up your own.
If one website was the website to plan an Airbnb vacation, it would have its own barrier that would grow with Airbnb. This would leverage a popular strategy of growing out of a larger, more successful host.
[1] - http://all-about-airbnb.com/post/127856658166/airbnb-public-...
> The Priceline Group spends over $2 billion per year on Google Ads alone.
WOW, that's unbelievable.
> even when one of them sends a link to some vacation rental he’s found on Airbnb that’s not available on your app.
I thought this hypothetical app was supposed to be amazing in every way, and it doesn't even support AirBnb