THERE are many different types of travellers. Some are backpackers who usually go with the flow and spend more than a week to a month at any destination. There are families or groups that travel together.
Then, there are the working professionals on a week’s getaway. They are independent travellers who like to plan their trips in an attempt to get the most out of them.
Online travel platform Touristly hopes to be the trip planner for the latter group, who are mostly between 25 and 35 years old.
The company noticed a gap in the travel market for people who like to organise their trips but often face the cumbersome process of having to go to several different websites for research.
What Touristly is focusing on is on the activities that people would want to do whilst on holiday.
“We’re already booking our flights via airline platforms and arranging our hotel accommodation through another platform, so the third thing to do is to plan the holiday through Touristly,” says Aaron Sarma, founder of Touristly.
Sarma and an angel investor put in less than RM200,000 to get the company up and running. They plan to break even by year-end. Last December, the company secured an investment from Netrove Ventures Group, a regional investment and advisory firm.
Typically, online users would plan their trips by visiting several websites. Each platform would usually repetitively require them to key in their personal details, which can be a bit of a nuisance.
The other option would be to go through a travel agent who will do everything for you but it comes in an existing package, which means little or no customisation.
Touristly’s goal is to make the process simpler and rid users of the nitty-gritty of knowing how things work such as hotel bookings.
“You will have an entire itinerary planned and you book everything in one click. What used to require you to visit six to seven sites, you can do it in one now,” says Sarma.
“In our back end, we have dates booked for everybody and we know when each offer is available, how each operator works and if there are blackout dates.”
The website may give users the impression of a Groupon-like model for travel, but Sarma insists that Touristly’s vision is to be a one-stop trip-planning platform.
“Ours have discounts but that’s not the main focus,” he says. The platform now offers up to 35 destinations in Asia and Australia, and the most popular is Taipei.
Touristly will be launching 19 more destinations in the coming week.
Your one-stop travel planner
Since its launch in early June, the platform has garnered 2,100 users and created 1,100 trips. Currently, there are more than 3,000 offers on the platform, with 5,000 others in the pipeline, which will go live when more destinations are added.
Touristly takes a commission on all transactions, and the amount varies from merchant to merchant.
How does Touristly work?
After signing up on www.touristly.com, users can choose a destination to create a trip.
To customise the trip, they have to key in information such as how many people are involved, their names and ages.
By providing the age, Touristly will be able to chart out the different prices available in some of the packages. Sometimes the prices differ for senior citizens and children.
Next, users will be presented with a blank itinerary, which they can fill up with any of the offers listed on the platform.
Touristly also gives them the option to create public or private trips.
“Some people want to share their trips with others, and we do see value in the trip creation component. It works like some sort of recommendation as these trips are created by real people, not travel agents or a bot,” says Sarma.
When the user is done, he can just click the check-out button to pay for the trip’s activities.
After making the payment, he will be given individual certificates for the activities via email. The certificates have to be printed out and presented to the operator to take part in the activity.
The website also provides the option to print out the itinerary, which will list all the purchased activities with its basic information, including where they are located on a map.
In the near future, there will be a mobile app that has the barcode of the certificate to redeem an activity.
“The reason we started the website first is because we understand that when it comes to travel, the majority of people use apps for discovery but not for bookings. Only 30% of these people might use apps for bookings because ticket prices are high and they rather not risk it,” Sarma says.
He claims that Touristly offers one of best prices for holiday activities. “We compare our prices with those on other platforms and try to match them, if not beat them, where we can.”
To decide what activities to list on the platform, the team filters through top review platforms, such as TripAdvisorand Lonely Planet, to get the best deals for a certain destination. For example, they have to receive a minimum 3½-star rating on TripAdvisor.
According to Sarma, there are top 10 lists of “Things to do” for travellers at various destinations. For example, in Kuala Lumpur, the list includes visiting Menara KL, KLCC and Batu Caves.
“It needs to be very localised and interesting for the traveller rather than a local,” says Sarma. “We try to make sure that our offers are sites that tourists usually spend their time at.”
At the moment, the itinerary can only be built with purchasable activities. Touristly will soon roll out a feature that allows users to add things that are un-purchasable, like sightseeing.
“We do recognise from the start that if we want to be a trip planner and to really flesh out the trip planner capabilities while adopting a monetisation model, we need to have free activities like a walk in the KLCC park or the beaches,” says Sarma.
By doing that, Touristly will be able to better understand its customers’ needs, and this will help when it approaches potential merchants, he adds.
This article first appeared in #edGY, a section of The Edge Malaysia, on July 6 – 12, 2015.
