Best Travel Startups 2015

The ‘travel tech’ space is vibrant.

With so many travel startups gaining traction it can be difficult to keep up with all the new products in beta or early release. For me there are a few standout products worth noting this year. Some of my favourite new travel startups are disruptive, some create a digital marketplace and others find value in under-utilised sources. All of them deserve your attention.

1. Must

No one sees the world like you do…

Must is a free lifestyle photo recommendation app. It’s aim is to get users discovering, capturing, and sharing new experiences across the world. By categorising the coolest and most memorable experiences (see, eat, stay, do, drink and have) the app will create your ‘absolute musts’ to satisfy wanderlust. Launches this month.

2. AnyRoad

Quietly disrupting the offline world of professional tour guides with technology.

AnyRoad is to tour companies, what Airbnb is to hotels. It’s model brings technology to the remotest parts of the world, and brings unique bookable tours directly from independent guides. This point-to-point booking experience really works well and the sheer number of tours speaks volumes for its continual growth. High five to AnyRoad for also donating 5% of their revenue to non-profits.

3. Carry

The sharing economy turns the courier industry to ‘peer-to-peer’.

Carry turns unused space in your carry on luggage into potential income. Carry’s marketplace connects people who want to ship something with travelers who can carry the packages for them for a fee, at a noticeably reduced shipping cost. Security concerns aside (which Carry seem to have addressed at length), this is one of the smartest travel startups I’ve seen this year.

4. Yonderbound

The first ‘travel knowledge monetization platform’ paying commissions to reviewers

Yonderbound serves up an inventory of 380,000 bookable properties, but unlike other OTAs they share 70% of profit with anyone who creates review content (called a Yonderbox) on their platform. Net revenue is calculated by subtracting from a gross sale price (what you or your friends paid) the credit card fees, the processing fees (payment gateway, merchant bank and middleware) and the net rate Yonderbound paid for the property. Pretty interesting model and certainly a hot travel startup for this year.

5. Hotels By Day

Yes, ‘Daycation’ is now a word.

Hotels by Day are trying to create a new category of hotel booking. Imagine you need to unwind and relax during a work trip but do not need an over night stay – just book the day and check-out before 7pm. Starting with a very modest US based inventory, the company is well funded and has pretty ambitious plans to get more hotels involved. It will be interesting to see how the market could potentially be educated that this type of service exists, and how channel / property management systems all over the world handle a ‘day cations’ as a model.

6. Party with a Local

Established for a few years, but a really great travel startup…

This app had me at ‘hello’. Do you want to party with fun people when you’re travelling? Yes, so do I. Party with a Local is a geosocial networking application and social discovery platform for the iPhone. Using physical proximity, users can join in locals’ parties, events and meet new people. Works very well for more socially inclined millennial customers travelling through ‘party’ cities. Go download the app while I smash this Jägermeister.

 7. Wanderlust.ly

Intelligent travel budgeting to booking…

Deadly simple concept here. Plug in your budget, preferences and interests and Wanderlust compiles a number of packaged trips (flight through to accommodation) to match your criteria. Looking forward to seeing this launch.

8. Hopper

Stunning data driven app providing analysis of billions of flight prices to save money.

Hopper’s aim is to help consumers make smart travel choices backed by big data and quantitative analysis. Billions of flight data points are analysed to show you when the best time is to book flights and alerts them when their ticket price may go up or down. Absolutely debunks the ‘book early to save’ money on flights myth.

9. LocalFu

On demand travel plans written by locals.

Localfu is a marketplace for personalised suggestions from locals. Whether you’re going on vacation, moving to a new city, or simply looking for new things to do, Localfu connects you with the right people for a $5 fee.

10. Plansify

Real travel advice from travel experts…

Another marketplace for personalised travel advice, but at a much higher level. Plansify offers connections to genuine travel experts who can help planning volunteering in South Africa to living as an Expat in Berlin. Communication is done through their platform or via a 1hr Skype call.

The 10 Best New Free Tools for Start-ups and Small Business

The best things in life are freemium.

Whether you’re a start-up or small business looking to keep costs down, free online tools and services are always useful. Here’s the 10 best new free tools for start-ups and small business I’ve recently come across.

1. SocialRank

Quickly analyses your Twitter followers to engage the ‘Best’ and ‘Most Valuable’

I really like this service. SocialRank is an easy way to identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter. When you’re running successful Twitter profiles it’s difficult to identify the ‘Most Valuable’ or the ‘Best’ followers. SocialRank’s provides analysis of both: helpful for individuals and brands looking to activate a potentially un-engaged, but very ‘valuable’ followers and the customers that strike a great balance between engaging with you and having the reach or importance. Nice app to reward your best customers with.

2. Peek

Have an unbiased everyday user take a look at your website and give feedback

Peek is a great tool for anyone interested in user-centered design. Add your URL and an hour later a video is available where an everyday user talks through their experiences using your website. Just be prepared for a bruised ego!

3. Slack

Gets all your internal communication channels into one searchable place

Slack’s mission is to get all communication into one place – instantly searchable, available wherever you go. You create internal channels and tag communication so that it’s shared with the right people at the right team. Slack lets you send messages, files and comments, inline images and video, rich link summaries and integration with the services you use every day, like Twitter, Dropbox and Google Drive. And it’s free.

4. Mobile App Development Cost Calculator

Protip: It’s going to be expensive. This just helps your CFO come to terms with it.

Building for mobile is expensive. This handy tool takes you through a Q&A about your mobile product and estimates the cost of building it. Very useful for guidelines spending for native apps.

5. Pitcherific

Train and develop your elevator pitching with this simple and free tool

I find public speaking a bit like skydiving: nerve-racking but highly rewarding. Learning to pitch properly is all about practice, refinement and practice. Be that in the boardroom or in conference venue. Pitcherific is a great tool to help you craft your pitch, practice your delivery and record your improvement.

6. Hive

Unlimited free cloud storage with a social element mixed in

Between Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Box, and OneDrive the cloud business seems pretty crowded. Hive is a new entrant into the market combining an unlimited free cloud service with a layer of social. Last year they raised $500,000 in seed funding from Bigcolors, a German IT infrastructure company Link11 GmbH, and some angel investors. Worth taking a look purely for the ease of sharing large files.

 7. Ad Spend Calculator

Analyses your LTV + CAC to tell you how much you can spend on ads

The guys at Qwilr have created this handy free tool to calculate how much your business
can afford to should be spending on advertising. The tool takes you through a quick Q&A to calculate your Life Time Customer Value your Customer Acquisition Cost and Costs per method (PPI, PPC and Signup), and then suggests a spending guideline for each method. Probably works best building a SaaS model, but works for other industries too.

8. Product Management by Intercom (Free E-Book)

Des Traynor and John Collins share their lessons in building great web products

Four chapters: ‘Evaluating your product’, ‘The thing about new features’, ‘Which new features to build’ and ‘Getting the feature used’. This book helps you make better decisions on which features to improve on, which features to not and how to build a better product.

9. Pablo

Online image design tool created for social media posts

Pablo is one of the better text over image web tools. When you’re too rushed to open up Photoshop, pop onto Pablo to add text and crop images to the right dimensions for your social media posts. Pocketbook

10. Mention

A Real-time media monitoring application that kicks ass

Mention does what any real-time monitoring tool should and it’s free to use on a basic plan. It monitors millions of sources (including multilingual sources) and connects directly to your social media accounts to post from one central place. What’s really good features are it’s sentiment analysis tools and priority inbox. Definitely something worthwhile to cut down noise from homonyms and spam.

Bonus 11th – Musicisum

Has nothing to do with business at all, but I love guitar and this tool kicks-ass

Rabea Massaad is a legendary guitarist and this new web tool is a creative and interesting way to learn the ‘real’ art of playing modern electric guitar. From advice on holding a pick, all the way to becoming a shredding master this is a fun way to learn. The first lessons are free and then reverts to a paid subscription model.