TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring China-based Trave.ly, a marketplace that connects travellers with local and expat guides offering tours, activities and experiences.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
We are David Cummins and Manyu Lui.
David was previously a venture capitalist at the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund. Â Prior to that, he lived in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen) for four years and worked for two start-ups. Â David speaks English, Mandarin, and a smattering of Shanghainese.
Manyu was previously a senior software engineer at IMVU, a leading 3D chat-based virtual world with more than 25 million registered users. Â He originally hails from Hong Kong and speaks English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We raised some seed capital.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Trave.ly helps travellers to international destinations go beyond the guide books by enabling them to discover and book unique tours, activities, and experiences offered by real people.
Our initial geographic focus is on China, specifically Beijing and Shanghai.
We’re excited about China due to its growing popularity as a travel destination (58+ million people visited China in 2010), language and navigation challenges for Westerners, and our familiarity with the market.  We expect to roll out to additional cities in China and more countries around the world over time.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Trave.ly is a marketplace that connects travellers with local and expat guides offering unique tours, activities, and experiences.
Our guides are a collection of locals and expats who are living in and familiar with the destination city. We encourage guides to create tours around their interests and passions.
We have cooking, eating, shopping, photography, running, painting, art, Mahjong, Chinese language, and many other types of tours, activities, and experiences on the site today.
One of the most interesting tours we have on the site is a Soy Sauce Factory Tour, which enables travellers to visit a fully functioning soy sauce factory and learn how soy sauce is made the traditional way in China.
Travellers can browse tours, read reviews, communicate with tour guides, and book tours, activities, and experiences directly on our site in advance of their trip. Â After booking their tour, travellers simply print out their tour voucher and give it to their tour guide.
This way, they don’t have to worry about cash or exchange rates on the day of the tour.  After the tour, travellers can leave reviews for future travellers to read.  Our tours start at $25.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our target customers are non-Chinese speaking travellers to China who want unique different travel experiences. Our customers tend to be professional 25-45 year people that fall between budget and premium tour package travellers.
They are able to see the usual tourist sites on their own but are interested in going beyond the guide books to gain more unique local experiences in the cities they visit.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Having been to more than 30 countries and lived abroad ourselves, we’ve been both the traveller and the guide for family, friends, and friends of friends.  Tours and activities are the third largest segment in the travel industry, after hotel rooms and airline tickets, so it’s clear the market is there.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Travellers book their tours directly on our site using a credit card or PayPal. Â After the tour occurs, we take a 15% commission and pay the rest of the money to the guide using PayPal. Â As with any marketplace business, they key to profitability is scale.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- We are initially geographically focused on China. Â This focus enables us to build up a large concentrated selection of tours for travellers to choose from, build close relationships with people powering tours listed on our site, and curate the tours, activities, and experiences on the site to ensure quality.
Weaknesses:
- Marketplaces are inherently difficult to build, but we’ve had good initial success building up the supply side of the marketplace.  As with any young company, we always want to move faster than our resources will allow.
Opportunities:
- We think that the future of travel is social and more personalized.  The tours and activities space on the Internet today is extremely fragmented and dominated by commodity style tours and activities.  The guide book industry has been around for decades and offers travellers little personalization.  We’re excited about the opportunity to help travellers who would have never considered themselves the “tour type” find fun unique things to do on their trips.
Threats:
- As a small company, the deck is always stacked against you. Â The biggest challenge for us is finding efficient channels to consistently reach more travellers.
Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?
Many people have told us our idea won’t be successful due to the competitive nature of the travel space and inherent challenges in scaling marketplace businesses, while other people tell us they’ve been waiting a long time for a solution like Trave.ly.
Ultimately, we’ll let the broader market determine whether or not we’ll be successful.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We hope that more guides continue to list tours and more travellers are able to use Trave.ly to discover and book unique experiences that make their trips memorable.
We intend to roll-out our product to additional cities within China and countries around the world over the coming months.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.
About Alex Bainbridge
