Airlines, hotel groups and loyalty programme operators are all potential customers for Dublin-based start-up TripAdmit, which has developed a B2B platform that helps them earn ancillary revenue from booking worldwide tourist attractions for their clients. The TripAdmit platform offers live availability on more than 50,000 day trips, experiences and destinations in more than 100 countries and the big win from the consumer’s point of view is no more queuing at venues.
TripAdmit is fresh out of the starting blocks, having been set up only in April, but its co-founders John Maguire and Andrew Kelly have nearly four decades of commercial experience behind them. Chief technical officer Kelly, an artificial-intelligence and cognitive science expert with experience in app development and the internationalisation of digital brands, has been working on the platform's development for the last year, while Maguire's background is in online sales and marketing in the ticketing, tours and travel sectors. Maguire is a former ecommerce director at Smartbox and former vice-president of sales and marketing with international experiences company City Wonders.
“Having worked in online sales and marketing for more than 20 years, I had seen the online migration of the travel industry first-hand,” Maguire says. “Airlines, hotels, car hire and B&B had all moved, but tours and activities still remained largely offline. It was clear it would follow the same evolution, so for me it was all about the timing. Rather than looking at it from the outside again I wanted to be part of it and to take advantage of one of the few sectors left that offered such a giant opportunity.”
Dynamic pricing
However, the founders were not interested in being just another booking site. Their focus from the outset was on developing a sophisticated solution for the B2B market that offered key advantages such as easy-to-integrate technology and the opportunity to make the most of dynamic pricing and yield management – techniques Maguire says are not currently utilised in this sector.
TripAdmit is also leveraging the fact that although its potential customers are heavily digitised and would like to generate more income from tours, they don’t have the capability to manage the fulfilment or the time to build their own systems to do it. TripAdmit’s aim is to provide them with the answer on a plate and they can choose from a white-label ready-to-go website to full web and app integrations that Kennedy says will have a minimal impact on in-house IT resources or their existing website.
“Our customers already have main revenue streams such as selling airline seats or hotel rooms and the bulk of their IT resources are directed towards that, but ancillary income is also important and we have made it really easy for them to plug into our platform without any huge effort in terms of time or resources. With our platform, their customers can book everything from a visit to the Empire State building to a trip to the northern lights to something specific like a group or walking tour. Around 85 per cent of experiences are still sold offline with tickets purchased at the destination. Our technology has the potential to disrupt this whole market,” Maguire says.
Investment in the business has been about €100,000 and the company is in the final stages of raising additional seed capital which will be primarily used to build out the team. The revenue model is shared commission with its distribution partners. TripAdmit employs six and is currently participating in the NDRC's accelerator programme at the Portershed in Galway. TripAdmit does not have direct competition as its focus is B2B whereas companies such as Expedia are essentially B2C. The company's platform, which is now in its final testing phase, will go live with its first airline customer later this year.
