STARTUP STAGE: TroopTravel wants to fix corporate group travel planning

TroopTravel

TroopTravel is a platform to help corporate travel managers add intelligence and efficiency to the process of planning meetings and events that involve attendees from different parts of the world. 

Speaking with PhocusWire, co-founder Dennis Vilovic shares how the system analyzes thousands of data points, alleviating some of the manual work that burdens most corporate travel managers and freeing them to focus on customer service.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup?

Have you ever tried to organize a trip for a group of people coming from different starting locations? How do you find the best location to meet? We use big data and machine learning to get your global team in one room.

We are integrating thousands of different data points, which allow you to personalize your location search. Many of our clients have specific criteria when looking for meeting locations such as finding a location that has an office or that has the least environmental impact when traveling to the location. We can connect all these requirements with our algorithm and make sure that we find your ideal meeting location for your global team.

Our platform is built on an open‐API concept which allows us to integrate external travel services. This gives the ultimate flexibility to our clients to only use (and pay for) the services they really need.

What inspired you to create this company?

My co‐founder and I met while working at a global organization with thousands of members around the world. The organization was planning many in‐person meetings for members coming from different areas in the world. The question then was always, “Where do we meet?”

Mostly, the meeting selection was based on personal opinions rather than on real data. That is where we saw an opportunity to actually use data to find the best meeting locations. On the one hand we are able to identify cost savings for the trip but as well create accountability on why the team meets in a certain location.

One of our analyses actually found out that it was cheaper for a group of 41 travelers (50% coming from North America) to rather meet in Bali than in any US location. Not a bad place to be, I would say.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company?

One could maybe see it as a weakness, we see it as a strength that the expertise of the founding team comes from outside of the travel industry. We are able to look at the way we do things in corporate travel with fresh eyes. This allows us to quickly see inefficiencies and to question existing practices.

However, having a deep understanding of the industry is very important when building services. Thus, along with spending a lot of time with industry stakeholders and experts to learn from them, we also built a strong team of advisors including CEOs of travel service providers and travel buyers around us.

So far, our approach received a lot of international recognition from different stakeholders in the industry. We won, for example, the Disrupt Award at the Business Travel Show, which is the biggest industry event in Europe. In addition, Amadeus, a key player in the travel industry, gave us its endorsement on our technology side by selecting TroopTravel as the winner of the “Hack the Journey” event in Madrid. Lastly, we won Techsylvania, a leading technology event which brings international investors and promising startups together.

Nevertheless, we cannot forget that we are a startup. Thus, focus is key since resources are generally scarce and this may be seen as a weakness, but it is as well an opportunity.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

From the customer perspective we are reducing the time travel managers need to collect and analyze data for multi‐origin group meetings. If you have ever tried to organize a meeting with people from different starting locations, you will understand the difficulty in bringing the data together. Already organizing a meeting of two people can be a huge task.

Travel managers are spending days if not even weeks compiling all data for travel planning. The moment, you have all data together, the value becomes almost useless because prices can have changed remarkably over the last days. We bring all these data points together in a matter of seconds. Thus, we are saving time needed to compile the data as well identify cheaper locations that you would have not considered without our analysis. Our case studies identified travel savings of up to 70% through interchanging meeting locations.

From the industry perspective, people don’t want another stand‐alone system. I just came back from an event in Singapore where key travel buyer executives met to learn about future trends in the industry. The common pain point of all travel buyers was perfectly summed up by one of the executives, “Travel buyers are fed up with too many people in the industry doing the same thing without talking to each other.”

That’s why we have built a platform that easily integrates third‐party services. As a travel buyer you can build your personalized travel program while as a travel service provider you are able to make your product quickly accessible to continuous growing crowd of travelers.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

So far, we have almost exclusively focused on building the product rather than any marketing activities. All our trial customers, many of them are Fortune 300 companies, reached out to us because they have read about us in the media, met us at events or have been introduced to us through their peers. Within the first month of our alpha testing period, we on‐boarded a number of big multinational companies, which are together representing more than 500,000 potential travelers.

In addition, we are experiencing that there is a huge interest in the results we are producing from our data source. Some of the conclusions sound so counterintuitive that we actually get contacted for speaking opportunities to elaborate further on those findings. This is another way we are able to create excitement about our product.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market?

One of our principles in building the company has always been “doing the things ourselves.” We could have engaged at an early stage professional tech developers or outsourced key parts of the development, but we always opted to create everything on our own. Sometimes it took us much longer than a professional resource could have done it and maybe the result would have been nicer sometimes, but this approach helped us to really deep-dive in to understand the clients’ problems and the details of the solution. I strongly believe that this strategy helped us in the end to get that traction we are experiencing right now.

...we are using big data to facilitate decision-making in business travel and that should be relevant to any business traveler.

TroopTravel

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Talking about the size of the opportunity, recently I listened to a podcast of a travel tech venture capitalist and they mentioned that every 10th person in the world is working in the travel industry. They argued that the travel industry is much bigger than just airlines and hotels. People who are working in a restaurant are linked to hospitality and as such to travel. For many people, food is an important aspect of a trip. So if you approach our addressable market with the same kind of view, you see the huge opportunity. Our core product is helping global teams to come together and there is a huge need for this among international companies and travel service providers. But if you think about it, in the end we are using big data to facilitate decision-making in business travel and that should be relevant to any business traveler. Thus, the size of the addressable market changes immediately.

How and when will you make money?

We are currently running a closed trial period with a number of multinational companies. They are using the system for free in exchange for detailed feedback. Starting end of this year, the use will be charged to the trial customers. Thus, by end of this year, we are starting to make money.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Our founding team covers the business and technology side. Leonard Cremer, my co‐founder, is a serial entrepreneur who built and scaled a technology business throughout Africa. He is the technology lead and brings as well important business and scaling experience into the team. I have been working for many years as an advisor to foreign governments looking at how to bring innovation and efficiency into operations. In the end, using big data for your travel planning is about creating efficiencies. Currently, travel managers need weeks to identify potentially good meeting locations while TroopTravel needs minutes to compare hundreds of locations for your global team.

To complement that, we on‐boarded a great selection of advisors around us. Among them are well known travel tech CEOs, business travel influencers and technology geeks.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

I guess when you are building a service which disrupts an established industry, it is very difficult at the beginning to get access to the right partners and players. People may not take you seriously because it almost seems impossible for a start‐up to change the way business travel planning is done.

When we started, we would have loved to be able connect to some of the top players earlier but in the end, it helps us to refine our strategy and approach. Today, top clients, suppliers and partners are reaching out to us. We have just been invited to pitch to a global airline and one of the biggest travel management companies just reached out to us.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Looking at business travel, we believe that there are still many opportunities for disruption. The business travel industry is very resource intensive. A lot of activities and tasks are still done by people, although technology could do some of these tasks much better. We believe that travel managers should rather look at providing customer service than being busy with manually collecting data to run analysis. And that is where we help them.

What question might we have missed......?

We are an international team, distributed over several different locations in Europe and Africa. Thus, we use our own system to organize our in‐person meetings. The question you may have missed is: Where have you met so far and where do you meet next?

Our team has met in Jordan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, Portugal and Spain. Our next encounter will be at the Techcrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September this year. So if anyone wants to meet us, look out for TroopTravel!