TheMIN Staff: Tripsi is a platform currently targeted at the educational group tour organizer (a teacher or parent). Staff have been in this situation and can see the benefits of booking, confirming and collecting money from children and families on the trip. None of this functionality exists on the competitive travel sites at this time. Here are some answers that Tripsi gave us last month.
Why can’t people use existing platforms?
Priceline sends you to a phone number and a “please call us message” when you chose more than 3 rooms to book. Expedia has a similar message when you want to book a large number of rooms or have more than 6 people travel at once. Our goal is to get you the answer without having to make you go through a confirmation process. Expedia does not qualify you it basically assumes a certain amount of risk with every buyer and limits the type of buying to increase success. We move into an area where we need to pre-qualify buyers by signing on school boards. There is also no travel based procurement solution targeted at $150 billion educational overnight travel market.
Explain who your target customer segments are and who the main persona is in each segment
Tripsi platform focuses on group travel, in particular for our initial market, we have targeted Educational Overnight Travel. Tripsi does this by making it simple and easy for School Boards to manage the information flows required for their approval and procurement processes including insurance standardization and risk mitigation.
Describe how the company will acquire customers
Tripsi plans to target School Boards, which will advise, recommend and ultimately require teachers and vendors to utilize the tripsi platform for Educational Overnight Travel procurement and organization. For School Boards that haven’t adopted tripsi, individual teachers and principals will be targeted and then the resulting information and details used to show their school board the value of tripsi.
How long does it take to get a lead through the sales funnel to become a buyer?
It takes less than 60 minutes for a teacher to request a quote and from 3-12 days for a teacher to get a response to be able to book a trip. Teachers can access the platform right now, but we plan to get more teachers on the system by approaching school boards (3-6 month endorsement process). Then helping the boards disseminate training and usage information (1-6 weeks depending on the number of teachers).
What barriers do you see for competitors?
The selling cycle is long (9-12 months), and we started developing the platform 18 months ago. We’re developing our relationship with the top boards who want to buy and support Canadian. Online travel sites want you to buy and go away. We develop a longer-term relationship with the buyer and the tour seller that is not interesting for companies like Priceline and Expedia. We are exploring benefits to tour sellers as a lead generation platform that does not exist on the major platforms, and making relationships with insurance providers, fundraising partners, and payment processing platforms in the educational space.
How can interested people reach you?
https://www.mytripsi.com/ or Co-founder John Galbraith john@mytripsi.com.
We have extended interviews and coverage on Tripsi, please contact Tripsi or angels@themin.ca for information. Some membership is beginning the interview process for a seed round, please contact aao@themin.ca if you would like to join the cartel.