Travel-focused startups that could have been wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic have instead flourished. TravelJoy, a company that provides a suite of tools to travel entrepreneurs and travel operators, now has customers spending more than $1 billion annually as interest in travel revived in the U.S. in the months following the pandemic. exceeds. The company is now turning to AI to power the next phase of growth for its business.
For co-founder and CEO Dayo Esho, the idea for TravelJoy came from growing up in the travel industry and supporting his mother's travel agency business.
“I knew there was something there, so I decided to put myself out there,” he says. “Before we started writing the software, we actually interviewed 50 travel agencies. The story was very similar to what I saw with my mom: 5 million spreadsheets. People were working until midnight every night, receiving no service at all, and trying to make ends meet by faxing forms and emailing credit card information.”
Esho teamed up with longtime co-founder and CTO Chris Kline and worked on the project for several years after their previous product discovery startup, Shelf, went out of business. Prior to that, the two worked together for the better part of a decade at his Rapleaf spinout LiveRamp, before he was acquired by Acxiom in 2014 and exited for $310 million. Did.
“I like to joke that Chris and I have been together the longest, because we've been working together for 17 years,” Esho said with a laugh.
Image credits: Traveljoy; Founders Chris Klein and Dayo Esho
The co-founders began working on TravelJoy in 2018 while participating in NFX's accelerator. The software is designed to help travel entrepreneurs compete with DIY travel planning tools like Expedia and Booking.com, eliminating the cost of joining a host travel agency, associated overhead costs, and the use of outdated software. No matter, instead, TravelJoy's online dashboard allows customers to monitor all their planned trips in one place, with built-in CRM and messaging tools, payment support, and more coming soon. Includes booking integration.
The company also recently added integrations with travel insurance provider Faye and travel experience marketplace Viator.
Image credits: travel joy
The idea is to centralize the workflow of travel entrepreneurs by bringing together CRM, messaging, invoicing, payments, proposals, itineraries and group travel management into one digital solution. Software-as-a-Service is priced at $30 per month, or $25 per month if paid annually. The company has partnered with Stripe to monetize payments, and plans to monetize the booking process as well.
The company just started taking off in 2019, raising a seed round and expanding its customer base.
But then 2020 arrived and things basically went haywire for the new company.
Despite the pandemic having an immediate and massive impact on travel around the world, Traveljoy surprisingly did not shut down. Instead, the founders focused on serving existing customers who were canceling trips instead of booking them.
Image credits: travel joy
“When COVID-19 hit, we ended up giving them a two-month credit because of the tremendous amount of pain we saw. Our GMV was down over 90%… , it was one of those things where we just put our heads down and nobody laid down” and continued to work on the business. You just have to take the long view. It’s a long journey,” says Esho.
The team ended up building a new tool to help customers reschedule travel for their customers, as well as a gift card page to support local businesses. Eventually, the height of the coronavirus pandemic was over, and travel began to recover in 2022.
A little more than a year ago, TravelJoy raised $10 million in Series A, which had not yet been announced. Theresia GauThe founding partner of Acrew Capital and former director of Hotel Tonight and Trulia led the round, which also included participation from NFX, Founder Collective, Forerunner, and Concrete Rose.
The software is currently used by thousands of travel entrepreneurs and aims to capture more of the U.S. market, which has approximately 200,000 full-time and part-time travel advisors. The remote distributed team currently includes 30 full-time employees, and TravelJoy is hiring in the areas of engineering, product design, marketing, and customer support.
With the additional funding, the service plans to add AI capabilities to support members' planning workflows. We'll be announcing more details on how these tools work in the near future.
Esho offers this tip: “By differentiating ourselves with an extra level of curation, superior service and support when things go wrong, we empower people to not only compete, but excel.” he explains. “We combine expert-level curation and support with the latest technology and AI. Only time will tell, but two versions of the world are forming: the Terminator and the Iron Man suit. They’re all wearing Iron Man suits,” he says.