Articles tagged “sss”

Given the headlines, while Rome2Rio, Captain Train and Loco2 are trying to get the message out that they are just as hot as travel-startup peer GoEuro, in contrast Hot Hotels is getting the word out that it will avoid some of the business model pitfalls of HotelTonight.

Travel startups pivoting from a consumer business toward a B2B focus is trendy, with founders and CEOs believing that there will be fewer marketing woes and reduced competition. But get in line when it comes to joining the droves of startups trying to sell to big corporations, hotels and travel agencies. The sales hurdle can be almost as intractable as the marketing roadblock.

A startup is only as good as the real-world use case it's trying to address, and sometime it takes the support of an accelerator to discover how to do this.

How does a travel startup succeed in Zimbabwe and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa? Focus on a neglected space in a huge market. Whether startup Africabookings can make it as a business remains to be seen. The market opportunity, though, is certainly humongous.

For travel startups, company culture is more than window-dressing. It can have a lot to do with whether or not you survive to fight another day.

Travel startups will never emerge from the startup phase if they can't be creative and figure out a way to scale their businesses and get people to use their websites and apps more than a couple of times per year. Sometimes it means community-building or expanding beyond "travel" into local discovery.

As Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson points out, it isn't alway the first-mover that leads to a successful exit for a travel startup. Often it is later arrivals with a team that can really execute and has better networks or more ample funding.

For a travel startup like Oyster, there's nothing like attracting the interest of a deep-pocketed buyer with a huge consumer audience. Oyster knew that is what it needed and it bucked the odds and lived to fight another day.