Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/462634
www.travelweekly-asia.com | 11 Everyone said it was going to be diffi cult to recruit agents as they are very much set in their ways. COVER STORY Customised itinerary planning remains one of the hardest problems to solve with technology but one Australia-based start-up is having a go at it. Tripbooka is an online platform connecting travel agents with travellers who want the ease of technology but still want the human touch when it comes to planning their holidays and itineraries. Luke Crawford, co-founder and CEO, shares the company's vision and plans. Describe what you're trying to do with Tripbooka. To build a universal platform where potential travellers who are looking for help, assistance, inspiration or research can come to one easy-to- use website and have everything they need at their fi ngertips. Traditional brick-and-mortar agents as well as OTAs who may have a call centre and have slow periods throughout the day can also log in year ahead. However the agents were more concerned with how management was going to help them bring new customers through their door. As they were literally thinking about their physical door, I was brainstorming around their online door as that's the way the world was heading and I guess the rest is history. How long have you been trying to solve the problem? What were some of the early challenges? I have been thinking about this for the last three-four years; however I didn't really start to focus on it until the beginning of last year. I wondered why previous attempts never succeeded as other companies have tried and failed, so for the fi rst two years I thought about how Tripbooka would be different to what's in the market and ultimately This, we found, had a negative impact on agent usage. To fi x the problem we consulted with many different agents across the travel spectrum to come up with the easiest solution whereby they could easily turn around a quote in minutes without too much disruption to their normal working day. Recruiting agents or generating customer demand – which is harder? Everyone said it was going to be diffi cult to recruit agents as they are very much set in their ways. However we found this to be completely untrue. Agents were willing to come onboard as they could see Tripbooka would help benefi t the traditional travel agent industry as a whole rather than being a competitor. With any new business, customer retention is always hard especially when working in a niche environment. However as we identifi ed who our target market was from the start, we have been able to drive a very effective marketing model to not only drive awareness but also usage. Tripbooka.com.au did a soft launch in Australia at the beginning of October last year and so far, we have had close to 5,000 users use Tripbooka, and more than 150 agents have successfully signed up. What are some of the current challenges? The main challenge is where we decide to innovate and add value along the travel research and booking fl ow. Our main goal is to have Tripbooka at a stage where it's almost the fi rst thing the agent logs into in the morning. We are currently integrating with many of the agent's suppliers to allow one simple universal log in for the agents. What is the adoption rate by customers? What kind of activity are you seeing on your platform? Currently we are have seen around 10% adoption rate which is above our planned forecast. We heavily monitored the system at fi rst as we were expecting a lot of people just testing the system. However when we started seeing the itineraries come through, we realised early on this was not going to be the case. We saw that these itineraries were more detailed than what you could do with any current online travel agency. These were travellers who seemed to be inundated with information overload and were not able to make a formed decision as a result. We also found that the travellers were more specifi c in what they were after and were happy to share that information with us. As a result of all of this we found the queries that were coming through were quality rather than quantity which was what we were after in the fi rst place. What's your revenue model? Currently Tripbooka is a free service for travellers and agents. We have a very clear and defi ned revenue model which will be released later this year. At the moment we are all about driving awareness to our unique service and to show that we can add value by bring customer service back to the online market. TRIPBOOKA: MARRYING THE BEST OF AGENT EXPERTISE AND DO-IT-YOURSELF By Yeoh Siew Hoon and potentially gain new customers at basically no cost. What gave you the idea? Why do you want to do this? The main idea came from a conference I attended a few years back. I was sitting amongst travelstore owners while listening to their senior leadership team talk about what they are doing from a head offi ce perspective and how they are going to approach the what the customer is after – and by customer, I mean both the buyer (the traveller) and the seller (the travel agent). Some of the early challenges we faced when designing Tripbooka were really from the agents' side. As the agents were acting as our back offi ce consultants so to speak, we really had to make it as streamlined as possible and not disrupt their current workfl ow too much. Luke Crawford: "Currently Tripbooka is a free service for travellers and agents."