| I spent a good chunk of the last 10 years in a travel startup that targeted consumers. I am unsure of the business model here but I can only imagine it's a pay-per-click from the big OTAs, mainly for hotels. The main problem with consumer travel is the fierce competition you are facing, Google is absolutely annihilating the search results in their favor, disgustingly so in the US and even worse in US on mobile. This leaves a startup like this in a tough spot, how do you acquire users? If you think about paying for them, you are in for a world of hurt, you can spend 1.8$ to get .8$ back for a hotel booking and it's absolutely an uphill battle to scale that up. I searched the name on Google and I saw the HN page, you two seem to have built a travel business before, you likely know a lot of the difficulties, but in my experience, trip planning scaling is a lot harder than what it seems, especially if you want to monetize it. If you don't mind sharing, what is the revenue model for TravelChime? |
Having worked in travel for a while now, we realize that paid marketing is incredibly competitive. Based on that understanding, we've actually never spent a single cent for paid marketing on our previous projects.
For growth: We want to just provide a really good central tool for people to plan their trips, and an easy way for those people to share plans with their friends. We think travel is inherently social, and that's something we want to do well (while respecting privacy).