Impact travel platform Triip.me to expand scope with Booking.com partnership: Page 2 of 2

 

Creating value

 

Impact travel platform Triip.me to expand scope with Booking.com partnership: Page 2 of 2

 

Ho reveals that connecting with Booking.com and coming up with the idea for how they could collaborate was mostly down to luck. Somebody from Booking.com connected with co-founder Ha Lam on Linkedin and then a friend offered to introduce them in real life. “Even before we met for dinner I had no expectations. But after dinner something just struck me and I called him up and proposed my idea for the partnership,” reveals Ho.

The lightning strike of inspiration came as Ho was trying to figure out what value Triip and Booking.com could add to each other.

Value and impact to the communities it is in is important to Triip; the underlying aim it strives for is to preserve local culture and get more people to benefit from tourism.

Ho explains that people outside the tourism industry – those who are not hotel owners, travel company owners or travel agents – do not directly benefit from tourism and generally feel that they have nothing in common with the strangers who visit their cities. The positive impact that Triip creates is enabling a local to share a weekend with a traveller, make friends and realise that both can learn from each other.

“In the very beginning, we didn’t realise that this was the impact we would have. Now that we know that this is what we stand for, we wanted to ensure that if we were having this conversation with Booking.com, this was going to create an impact for the local people,” says Ho.

Triip’s value proposition hinges on the fact that the modern traveller wants to immerse himself or herself into the local culture and contribute positively to the local community. What has added to the partnership with Booking.com is a contribution of 5% of its commission on any hotel booking on its website to local communities.

“You can simply sleep in a local hotel and when you wake up you have helped contribute to a local community,” says Ho, indicating that Triip does not believe taking 5% out of its commission is too big because low operation costs plus the success of other products still ensure business sustainability.

Triip is working country-by-country and city-by-city to determine which local communities will benefit most from a contribution; Ho says Triip is still open to suggestions. One option Triip is in deep discussions with SimplyGiving.com, an online fundraising platform that is part of Gobi Partners’ portfolio.

A reliable partner for this project is essential. “Doing charity work is harder than building a company,” quips Ho. On a more serious note, Ho says that in the course of this project the Triip team found that there are numerous fake social organisations in different countries and that there is more to running a charity that meets the eye.

“But I’m glad that we learned about these things. We looked at how we could apply the startup mentality to these problems. I think this is the best and safest way for us to create impact and maximise the money people are donating,” he says. In each country it is in, Triip chooses a charity organisation to work with and measures how well they work together and the impact the work has on the local community. If things do not go well, Triip moves on to another organisation and starts testing again.

Flexibility of business and mind

Triip is currently attempting to raise US$1,000,000 for its pre-Series A round, which will go a long way to growing the new collaborative platform as well as revenue.

Last year, Triip’s gross merchandise volume grew 20 times, from US$20,000 in 2015 to US$400,000 in 2016. Ho says that this year, with the pre-Series A funding, Triip will be able make profit within the next 18 months; it is targeting a revenue of US$4 million.

Ho is confident about Triip’s ability to reach its targets, saying that the team learned great lessons from last year’s operations and from organising and the outcome of the Global Travel Entrepreneur Challenge 2016. “When we are profitable, we will have a lot more flexibility to carry out our plans.”

Ho reveals that the biggest mistake Triip has made since starting operations is not thinking about a partnership with a hotel booking platform (such as the one with Booking.com) earlier. “I was stubborn about sticking to the original idea [of just providing local tours]”

Another big mistake Ho thinks Triip made as a fledgling startup was believing that relying on the co-founders’ experience in the travel industry was enough – Ha has about 10 years’ experience. “Actually, we had to make sure that the whole team has the same understanding of travel and tourism, not just one founder because sharing such knowledge is not so easy.”

Triip fixed this problem by getting its team members to experience how locals run traditional tourism businesses so that they could see how traditional tourism – what Ho calls tourism 1.0 – could evolve into Triip’s vision of the future – tourism 3.0.

“If you jump too far without preparation, you’ll fall. What we’re doing at Triip right now is to improve traditional tourism with technology, which is tourism 2.0.”

Contrary to popular belief, Ho says that there is plenty that tech startups can learn from traditional businesses that are using the same business models that have been around for hundreds of years – “There is something they must be doing right.”

“That’s the thing I wish I realised earlier, so I could have learned a lot more by now.” Ho does, however, say that one of the best things about working in Triip is travelling for work, which gives him and the team constant opportunities to learn new things, even those outside the scope of work.

“And as a CEO, you have to learn everything,” he says.   

 
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