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Created by a frequent traveler who was tired of spending more time planning his trips than actually vacationing, HipTraveler.com is the ultimate one-stop, image-based travel-planning site that is guaranteed to ease the pain we’ve all become accustomed to when planning and booking a trip. HipTraveler’s business model is significantly different than most travel websites and is based more closely on collaborative economy models like AirBnB and UBER. Local travel experts, or “Ambassadors” in HipTraveler lingo, gets rewards when a traveler uses one of their pre-built itineraries to book travel. Travelers can earn the right to become an Ambassador on the site by consistently providing the best content, recommendations, and of course Itineraries. “We drew a straight line between what the traveler needs to expedite the process of travel planning and what savvy travelers are best at providing”, says John Baumgartner CEO & Founder. HipTraveler also made it fun and easy for these budding Ambassadors to put together itineraries by providing powerful and intuitive planning tools. HipTraveler’s planning tools allow travelers to tap into visually appealing meta-searched content that includes over 50 million points of interest around the world. Travelers simply find what they like on the site and then drag and drop to the Itinerary Builder. Travelers can also import images from their computer or via about 20 Social Media services including Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr. The end result is that these collected Itineraries are now searchable by other travelers, printable, shareable for collaboration, and fully bookable on the site. Additionally, travelers have the option of either booking for themselves or enlisting the assistance of a professional travel agent. HipTraveler does the matchmaking on the back end to present agent options that are specialists based on your trip preferences.
“We combine visually inspired travel content, local Ambassadors, powerful planning tools; as well as the very best online booking resources like Expedia, Priceline, TripAdvisor and even offline travel agents, so that travelers need only visit one site to get inspired, plan their trip, and finalize their booking” says Baumgartner. Contrast this with the current process where the traveler visits 38 websites, on the average, and spends three times as long planning as they actually do traveling and you can see why searching through a curated database of travel options is so much more efficient and frankly, so much more fun. Additionally, visual design is central to HipTraveler’s strategy. They felt that the current offerings in the market failed to cater to the increasingly visual and social elements that consumers, specifically GenY and the Millennials, have become accustomed to on today’s popular sites/apps like Pinterest, Flipboard, and Tumblr. After all, travel is a highly visual & social experience. “Think about it - It’s an image that often inspires a person to travel in the first place. It’s an image that captures the moment while traveling. And finally, images are how we recollect the good times that were shared after the trip. Why shouldn’t travel planning be a similar experience?”, asks Mr. Baumgartner.
When asked how HipTraveler plans to compete with the big players in the industry, and specifically how a boot-strapped company plans to survive in such a competitive marketplace, Baumgartner responds “Half of all travel booking is still transacted offline today. If the online solutions that exist in the market today were adequate, that number would be near zero.” He continues, “If you look at the true disruptors today in virtually any industry, they are the small, scrappy companies that built their products as platforms with enough flexibility to allow their customers to co-design the experience and use cases. We believe we’ve pointed the ship in the right direction and research is certainly on our side, but it’s our customers that are truly building the eventual product. It’s so exciting - a trusted network of travel experts, travelers and aficionados designing the ultimate travel website”.
The company has already made a big splash with this first-of-its-kind travel website. It was a finalist in the New Venture Seed Competition at USC's prestigious Marshall School of Business, earned a place within IncubatriX (a startup Incubator for USC’s Grief School of Entrepreneurship), and won day one of the Lean Model Startup Competition in San Diego.
