TravelTech for large group bookings

Today, we discuss tripmakery's origins, how it is revolutionizing group travelling, and its future plans with Robert, one of its founders.

Hello Robert! You're currently the CEO and founder of tripmakery. I'm interested in your background. What circumstances inspired you to start a tech startup?

I'm originally from Berlin and many of the big German startups like Zalando, HelloFresh or Delivery Hero were founded around the corner from where I lived. That was a big inspiration for me and I was looking for a university that had a strong entrepreneurial background. So I came to Vienna and studied entrepreneurship and finance. During my studies, I met many like-minded people who also wanted to build a product that everyone needed. After several unsuccessful projects, we built tripcake, the "Doodle for Travelling". It was a tool to organise and plan a trip with friends. We even launched it in the US and had quite a bit of success at first. But we needed to monetize it and that's how we "accidentally" ran into the problem of online group bookings. Because until now it's not possible or very complicated to book a hotel online for more than 10 people. That's why we started tripmakery.

What problem does tripmakery solve and how would you describe the problems it takes away from your customers?

Tripmakery is the "booking.com for groups." Since big hotel websites like "booking.com" or "Expedia" focus on the mass market and vacation rentals, they completely ignore group bookings. But group travel accounts for 10% of the total travel market, estimated at $1.4 trillion. So the "niche" for group travel is about a $140 billion market.

We're the only existing online booking platform that can handle group bookings for more than 10 people. If a customer wants to book a hotel for more than ten people, they have to email or call dozens of hotels, compare the offers, and handle the booking process. This is all quite complex and takes a lot of effort and time. We have built a whole new technical infrastructure to automate group bookings. Not only does this save our customers a lot of time, but hotels can also reduce their effort by 90% when they work with us to book groups.

What is the technology that sets you apart from your competitors, in a nutshell?

We're building an innovative API that can communicate with hotel systems to automatically accept and process group bookings. This has never been possible before, because now hotels can define their group conditions in our system to enable automatic group bookings. It took us several years to develop this innovative solution, but since we launched it during the pandemic, it has become a huge success. Thousands of hotels want to connect to our system and streamline their group booking process. This creates a whole new booking experience for customers, as they can access and book group deals in real time. This allows us to offer a service that is completely unique in the hotel booking world, because we can now scale group bookings. With just two employees, we now handle more than 7,000 groups per month with an average size of 26 people. These are school groups, companies, clubs, families and friends.

What's happening in the industry? Which trends are particularly important?

Due to staff shortages in the hotel industry, the pressure to innovate and optimize costs is higher than ever. Low-budget hotels and hostels with lower profit margins in particular need to automate group bookings. In most hotels, there is at least one person who is only responsible for answering manual group requests. The whole process is completely out of time. That's our advantage. We offer hotels a product where they decide how they want to work with us. Either fully automated or only partially automated. The hoteliers can decide and we don't force them to. That's what differentiates us from a lot of other players and solutions.

We're also seeing a strong trend in hotel pricing. In the past, there were fixed group rates for at least a year or more. But due to rising inflation and other circumstances, fewer and fewer hotels want to issue fixed group rates. This is complicated and requires a lot of time and effort. This is where our solution comes in, because we can provide access to high-yield and discounted group rates that can be booked immediately.

In which regions do you operate and how many brands use tripmakery?

When we founded tripmakery, we wanted to first develop a solid product that is highly scalable before internationalizing it. That's why we're still only active in the German-speaking market. In preparation for our internationalization, we have added more than 60,000 group hotels from all over Europe to our database. We're now working on a worldwide hotel database, as our German-speaking groups want to travel worldwide. The next markets will be the U.K. and France, and we hope to be active throughout Europe by 2025. But the biggest group travel markets are the U.S. and China, so that's planned for the next few years.

At the moment, some larger companies like Siemens, BMW, Bundeswehr etc. are using our services, but also sports clubs like Borussia Dortmund. In the future we want to attract more business customers to our website, so we need more resources to make tripmakery a brand.

What is the most important lesson you learned in starting tripmakery? Is it what you thought it would be?

It took much longer than expected to find a scalable solution to the problem. We worked on several different solutions that just weren't feasible. We learned that you really have to stay focused and stay on your path. There are so many ways to get distracted from your goals. It was good that we had our business angels and board members who had the experience to keep us on track, otherwise we'd have been lost. Starting a scalable online startup is a roller coaster ride, sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it. But at the end of the day, it's my dream job.

What is the most difficult part of scaling?

It's one part to have a scalable technical solution, but another part to work with customers and people to use that product. There are so many ways your product/service can be seen and misunderstood. It brings all the needs and stakeholders together and that's why your UI /UX has to be perfect or customers will quickly lose interest and never come back. Scaling is also about your internal processes as they need to match your ambitions. If your company isn't prepared internally to scale, you'll fail. You need to look at all processes, not just marketing or product, billing and HR need to keep up as well.

Where do you see tripmakery in three to five years?

In three to five years, I see tripmakery as the absolute market leader in our niche of hotel group bookings worldwide. Not only will we offer our service around the world, but we'll also add other services such as bus transfers, city tours and other group activities that can be booked through our website, making it a true marketplace for groups. We also want to offer our technical solutions to other market players so they can book groups as easily as we do. Tripmakery will become the technical backbone for group bookings.

What is so unique about tripmakery? Why should investors choose you?

Tripmakery is the only website that is able to automate and scale group bookings. We're currently processing more than 7,000 groups and growing by 10-15% every month. Our business is highly profitable and we're only a few months away from breaking even.

After several years of working with industry experts like the founders of "hotel.de" to develop a breakthrough new technology, we're now offering our solution to hotels and customers and seeing great demand. Now is the right time to invest in the future of hotel bookings and capture a "niche market" of $140 billion.

tripmakery is currently raising on SeedBlink. Explore the round here.