Who and what are you (including personal and backgrounds)?

BookingBrick provides iPhone and Android-hosted travel organisations with a solution for implementing easily a white-label hotel booking process directly inside their application and start monetising it.

Today, a lot of mobile applications are already offering hotel content – such as address, phone numbers, reviews, etc – but still do not generate revenue from it. That is the case for travel guides, local search, navigation, GPS or tourism boards apps.

With BookingBrick, these organisations will no longer lose potential hotel customers, as users will be able to book a room directly through their application. Obviously, owners earn a commission for each reservation made through their app.

BookingBrick is a French-based company which was co-funded by Nicolas Salin and Sébastien Houzé, after winning a Startup contest called StartupWeekend in December 2010.

Both founders are not new to the mobile booking sector, as they previously released an hotel booking app for iPhone called Hotel! which reached nearly 100,000 downloads.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

From the beginning, BookingBrick has been fully financed by its founders. But winning the StartupWeekend competition in Marseille naturally brought us press coverage and interests from several investors. We are now preparing our first round of funding to support our growth and develop new products.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Today, if you wish to create a great mobile booking experience based on an OTA’s white-label affiliate program it will cost you a lot of time and thousands of dollars to do it properly.

In the end, only big companies have those resources. The small and medium-sized owners cannot afford such an investment for an unknown ROI. BookingBrick fills this gap by providing a simple, fast and cost-effective solution to implement a fully customizable hotel booking system directly inside their application.

So, every hotel mobile application owner can start generating additional revenues while staying focused on their core business.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Let’s say that we are clearly focused on what we call “the long tail of mobile booking”.

From the small tourism board application with 10,000 downloads to the biggest local-search apps counting millions of users, we can help them:

• Monetize hotel content by embedding our booking process in their app.
• Collect certified hotel reviews from customers – we’ve created a solution that tracks customers from the initial booking to the review. This way, our affiliates will only collect reviews from people that really slept in the hotels.

BookingBrick’s main features:

• More than 100 000 hotels worldwide
• Easy to setup (1 hour)
• High-level commissions
• In-app booking process: we provide a development kit (SDK) to editors that incredibly speed up the implementation of our solution
• Certified reviews collecting system
• Fully customizable (white-label)
• Secured payment and data encryption
• Multi-platform (iPhone iOS/Android)
• Multilingual

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Mobile apps like travel guides, local search, navigation or tourism board apps that want to generates new revenues by monetizing hotel content.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, of course. Since we have been involved in the mobile and hotel business for nearly two years, we already had concept validation from several companies including some very famous ones. But, we’ll stay quiet on this!

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

BookingBrick is available for free. No setup fees.

We practice a shared commission model, with an incentive based on performance. The more our affiliates will promote the booking service inside their app, the more commissions they’ll get, the higher their commission level will be.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• A strong team fully focused on mobile hotel booking.

Weaknesses:

• BookingBrick is not available on BlackBerry yet! … C’est la vie !

Opportunities:

• Reach a large audience by focusing on the long tail of hotel booking on smartphones.

Threats:

• Hard competition in the travel industry and economic downturn which directly affects the hospitality industry.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Nobody. They just said: “Be in the market as soon as possible”. We’ve just opened our beta subscriptions! So stay tuned, the official launch is planned for the following weeks.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We target to reach an audience of five millions users in the next 12 months, through the implementation of BookingBrick in several successful apps, plus dozens of other small services.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Who and what are you?

Azurever is an aggregation platform which compares tours and activities from many providers (such as Expedia, Viator, Isango, Octopus, City-discovery and thematic operators in opera, trekking, etc) and is focused on answering european market specific needs (multilingual translation, development of european favorites destinations).

Azurever is an open platform specifically designed to be used by other portals through distribution partnerships.

The team:

• Arnaud Calteau – has worked for ten years in the e-tourism market and launched self-financed destination guides.
• Collin Moretto – former consultant, worked in improving banks and companies online performance.

We are both travel freaks, always looking for original and unique experiences. As French travelers, we found it was very difficult to find activities in our mother tongue and in our favorites destinations.

So we decided to launch a portal that could help other european travelers like us to find the best deals and personalized activities on their travel spots.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We self-financed the first steps of the project and since 2010 we have been funded by business angels for our international development.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Tours and activities market is actually focused on American travelers needs. It is also very fragmented with a lot of actors and poor comparison features.

Azurever helps european travelers to find unique experiences, in their mother tongue and at the best price.

We want to develop European markets with unique features, accessible through our portal and a network of partners websites. So far, we have more than 200,000 unique visitors looking at our catalog each month.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Azurever is offering a one-stop shopping area when visiting a tourist destination.

• Loca expertise: We select, traduce and compare the best activities from the biggest resellers and producers to adapt them to local tourism markets in Europe.
• Rich content: We have the most extensive catalogue on the European market (more than 15,000 tours and activities) mixing free content and pre-packaged activities.
• Multi-support: We are developing social media widgets and mobile applications to offer access to our content from every channel and every location.

We have also built a distribution program with a selection of European websites. Our first partnership is with Via Michelin Voyage, launched at the end of May 2011. Several other projects are coming up.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

• B2C: Travelers looking for unique experience at their holidays spots (www.azurever.co.uk)
• B2B: Any website that wants to provide activities, but mainly european travel guide websites and e-tourism portals (hotels chains, airline companies).

After launching in the French market in 2010, we opened our English version this year. We are planning launches of our Spanish, Italian and German versions at the end of 2011.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, we verified the concept with a panel of 100,000 visitors. The metrics were good enough to validate the concept.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Commission fees by the distributors or the producers of each activity. Revenue sharing with our partnership programs.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We’re specialized on the European market and with translation features.
• Expansion in French, Italian, Spanish and German speaking areas where big players don’t have a strong presence yet.
• We are going fast and we built a 15,000-product catalog in less than a few months.
• A strong network of partnerships to distribute our products.

Weaknesses:

• New company with no established brand name. We need to develop recognition via partnerships to enhance our visibility.

Opportunities:

• The activities market is a fast growing segment, specifically in Europe.
• Customers are getting more and more comfortable with searching and booking experiences on-line.

Threats:

• Time to market – there are a number of big travel websites with huge marketing budgets ready to get into this emerging market, when it is mature enough.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

A few professionals argued that “destination dervices” is huge hassle for small money and the competition will be dramatic when the market starts. This is true, but with our business model the more competition, the better.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Close to break-even. 500,000 visitors per month, with an active and happy travelers community.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

• Co-founder and CTO Scollay Petry has 20 year of online experience, having joined AOL as a small company in 1993. There he built the company’s first marketing database, first user behaviour data mining systems and the online industry’s first interactive reporting systems (pre-Web). Previous to AOL, Scollay was a consultant with Booz-Allen & Hamilton.
• Co-founder and COO Jack Gonzalez has 25 years of IT and marketing production experience. Jack worked in Spain as the IT Director for Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa at Bovis Lend Lease, and in marketing production roles he delivered intricate direct marketing and media campaigns at Time Life, International Masters Publishers UK and The Micro Marketing Group.
• Marketing and data mining systems advisor Tom Donegan is a former VP of direct response for AOL, having managed an annual marketing budget in excess of $400 million and delivering over 300 million direct mail pieces. Tom also managed telemarketing, call centre sales programs, and niche marketing strategies to high-value demographics.
• Huw Griffiths serves as a director and advisor. As European operations manager for Google Book Search, he set up and managed sites at Oxford University and in Germany and Spain. Prior to Google, Huw helped to develop and launch the Nectar Loyalty Program which now covers 50% of UK households, and he worked in IT and business development roles at Dell EMEA. Huw currently works to develop innovation and strategic projects within Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services groups.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

To date the company has been funded by the founders and a single angel investor.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The initial problem we were trying to solve was the lack of relevant content, information and advice available to gay travellers. We found that most gay travel information online and offline focused on bars, clubs, a “gay street” or small gay-owned B&Bs.

Missing was the broader travel and tourism experiences from a gay perspective – what we call “Travel through a Gay Lens”.

Also missing were clear channels to ask for and receive advice from socially relevant sources. One’s Facebook “friends” are likely to include mothers, young nephews, school mates from the distant past, work colleagues…

Mining this Facebook social graph for gay travel advice is not likely to yield very relevant results. We were also interested in meeting other travellers who share our interests, hobbies, and sporting passions.

While one can meet people through any number of online “dating” sites, those meetings typically carry a sexual context.

Finally a problem endemic to the travel industry as a whole is the lack of truly relevant e-commerce offers we receive in our email. Emails from major suppliers pitch us on “great travel deals from Chicago to Orlando” but we don’t live in Chicago and have little interest in Orlando!

Describe the business, core products and services?

We have developed QGuide, a site that allows gay travellers to build and explore their social travel graph.

Through profiles, personal maps, meeting and activity preference profiles, blogging and other integrated utilities, we are able to develop a view or graph that details a person’s:

• Places – planned travel, wish lists, favourite places, placed visited
• Activities – arts, culture, sports, adventure, games, bars, parties
• Style – independent, group, event-focused, “gay scene” vs. “non-scene”
• Content – blogging/tips platform purpose-built for travel (integrated GPS)
• Niche Context – gay travel

The overall value proposition of defining and then matching peoples’ social travel graphs is very clear.

Travellers can find great content from a gay perspective – for example a number of locals have written extensively about Buenos Aires or a traveller going to Sydney who’s interested in sailing can find dozens of locals and past visitors to query about sailing.

The real power lies in the fact that the site, audience and results are wrapped in the context of gay travel.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our customers are gay travellers, widely recognized as one of the most lucrative demographics in travel. We estimate that globally there are 80 million gay people who are internet-enabled.

Gay travel is worth $142 billion a year globally, and with generally higher disposable income a gay traveller in the US will spend $2,300 on a holiday versus only $1,500 for non-gays. Gay travellers are also 25% more likely to travel abroad.

Gay travellers are also transacting online: 80% bought their last holiday online, 78% used a smartphone when travelling to research local resource, and 74% and indicated they would like to receive travel offers before and during their holiday.

Gay travellers are active in social media and influenced by it:

• 69% share travel experiences online
• 50% share photos and videos online
• 78% indicated user-generated content was a major travel influencer/motivator.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

The founders’ own extensive international business and personal travel experiences first led them to identify the need for a gay-focussed travel service.

The first site – a Gay Guide (Web 1.0) to Australia – provided the foundation, experience, test-bed, and consumer validation for creating the Web 2.0 social site.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Very simply our model embraces relevance – content, social, and ecommerce relevance – which we believe in very straight-forward ways can be monetized.

We have identified nearly a dozen types of revenue, largely through affiliate programs which include advertising, hotel bookings, tour bookings and other travel-related products, and have focused on several “delivery” methods:

• Passive Placement: our user-generated content and destination feature pages provide high quality content for contextual targeting from Google Ads. We are seeing excellent response and click revenue as travel in general provides high-bid keywords, and we have the added benefit of serving a highly sought-after demographic.
• Search Placement (pull): we deal exclusively with vendors who have geocoded their inventory or whose inventory can be easily geocoded. With this in place we offer hotel search capabilities unlike any other site. For example, search on “Sydney” and you’ll very quickly identify the gay neighbourhood from the points on the map (reviews), and from there you can click to centre the map and find hotels, sorted by distance. Wherever possible, our content pages have GPS search links coded to the location of the article, and all of our member’s personal maps contain these search links as well.  http://petersin.qguide.com/
• Opt-In Data Mining (push): In addition to geocoding, we have also created a standard data dictionary that normalizes keywords between all of our member profiles and our travel inventory. Through smart, timely connections, we will be able to send members Opt-In (wanted) emails alerting them to content, people, and e-commerce relevant to their planned and wish list travel. For example, a member with wine in his profile could receive an email about wine tours a week before leaving for Paris, or a skier with Whistler on his wish list could receive updates about gay welcoming hotels with skiing facilities.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• From a growth perspective we’ve found an excellent promotional partner with millions of gay members around the world, which is making our member acquisition very targeted and efficient. Our gay niche provides strength as a demographic widely recognized as being social, trendsetting, and receptive to marketers who reach out to them in smart ways. The founders and advisors of our company each have years of experience in online services, marketing, retention, production, and data mining, which will make or end product unique and effective.

Weaknesses:

• Although the data architecture is in place, our service hasn’t been rolled out to a mobile platform yet.

Opportunities:

• Gay travellers spend on average $2,300 a year on travel. We believe that our members’ social travel graphs offer tremendous segmentation opportunities, so while we can serve budget or “average” travellers well, we can also identify higher-value prospects and provide more thoughtful and lucrative travel offers. Our site is built on a platform that can be easily extended to reach other (non-gay) high-value niche markets that are likely to be social, such as adventure travel, wine and food, families, or single women (several female friends have suggested a travel site around shoe shopping!)  We can easily seed and develop other sites and brands to service many different travel demographic and special-interest groups.

Threats:

• As with any Internet business, the low cost of entry for potential competitors, and the ever-changing nature of the internet.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Numerous people advised us that building site membership would be a difficult and expensive proposition, and that an “empty” social network would have a very difficult time getting initial traction.

“Who wants to come into an empty bar?” said one staff member of our start-up incubator. Of course, even Facebook and Twitter started with 0 members, so we knew it would be a challenge, but we also knew that we were offering something unique and needed in our market.

Through viral marketing and a strategic partnership, we’ve increased our growth rate from 70 new members added in December 2010 to over 1,600 new members added this month, March 2011.

We still have a lot of work to do to achieve critical mass, but we believe we have established a low-cost, sustainable marketing mechanism for even faster growth in the coming months.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Success will be continued site and member growth and monetization to make the case for creating our next niche site.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

What is the idea behind Zevisit?

Zevisit is making audio and video tours downloadable on web and mobile devices (GPS, iPhone and very soon iPad and Android). We have more than 5,000 tours covering 650 destinations.

Nature, tradition, culture, food, built heritage… the tours cover a wide range of topics. Start with exploring the Taj Mahal and other wonders of the world, have a stroll around the most bizarre streets in Paris and finish your tour with world of sounds in Marrakech.

How is the company funded?

Vox inzebox, the company behind Zevisit, was funded in 2000 by Yann Le Fichant. It is now a public company with a Euro 300,000 capital. We are located in the media center in Marseille.

What are the unique features?

Quality content – we have journalists writing the tours and conducitng interviews with locals. We have comedians for videos and our voice experts are recorded for the audio guided tours. The result is different from what we sometimes listen to on a museum’s audioguide. We also work with audio and video archives to bring emotion into our content.

Access – mobility and culture are intrinsically linked. For that reason, we wanted our tours to be available on various devices. Whether you are sitting in your car, in front of your computer or strolling with your iPhone or MP3, you can listen to a guided tour.

Geolocation – all of our points of interest are geolocalised, so that when you launch the iPhone application, it provides you the right travel information where you are, a useful feature when visiting a new city.

Explain the revenue model?

Our clients are public tourist organisations, promoting tourism in France and in Europe, locally and regionally. We provide them with a full package, including the creation of the audio guide, as well as the promotion of their destination on our network and our partner’s websites.

We are not only creating audioguides but also pushing them on big French travel portals such as Orange or Via Michelin. This business model allows us to offer a free service to our users on Zevisit.com and our iPhone app.

In the battle against competitors, what do you think will help you catch up?

Trustworthy relationships with the public tourism organisations. Our long-time B2B activity is a great asset for our reputation: it has been ten years since the sales team dealt with them, creating tailor-made guided tours.

We are very familiar with that institutional world. We also want to put the emphasis on our use of innovative technology. We developed several iPhone applications for different cities and regions, including an augmented reality release.

In the next few months, there will be more such as an iPad magazine and flashcodes. The new version of Zevisit should be also live by end of the year.

As for audio and video productions, software development is in-house made. This ability to master content production as well as development and web marketing makes our offer unique.

What about international expansion ?

On the B2B side, we depend on our clients, mostly located in France and in Europe. This is the reason why our tours cover these regions. But our goal is to expand and cover more destinations globally.

This has already been made with our international team of journalists called Tribu2Visit. Our writing team has travelled around the world to bring back interviews and tours from various places such as Argentina, South Africa and China. All these tours will be available in our next release.

What about wider international trends around etourism – mobile, augmented reality?

All of our points of interest in the guides are geolocalised. This fits perfectly with the mobile nature of travel and tourism: when you open our iPhone application, for example, you instantly get the tours that are nearby.

In April 2010, we officially launched an augmented reality release in Paris, Lyon and Rennes. The idea was to create an new and innovative panoramic view of a city.

Social media, travel social media, community management, are here to stay and important for brand awareness. What do you do at ZeVisit to be successful in this emarketing area?

ZeVisit is strong in the B2B market, but we wanted to get closer to our final users, without intermediaries. Knowing that we have content and a cool travel service to offer, social media emerged as an incredible opportunity for promoting our brand and spreading the word.

With Facebook reaching half-billion users, investing in community management was a wise decision. We recently launched a Facebook fan page and a place where we promote our content (video, audio and photo) and offer our fans ideas of guided tours in France and around the world.

On our Twitter account, we tweet about all relevant topics related to our activities: tourism, online travel, community management, mobile, geolocalisation and augmented reality.

France is well known for its historical assets and cultural tourism. Do you see some original convergence between tourism and technology?

Technology enables tourism information to be mobile. Attitude towards travel information has changed a lot in the last years. Whereas initially everyone was preparing trips before leaving, users are more enclined to get the information during their trips.

It is probably even more true when referring to cultural tourism, Since it is not (always) considered as a primary need (accomodation, restaurants), it is crucial to make that secondary information even more accessible.

Can you highlight some France startups or French technology that has international potential for travel sector?

• The Morcos brothers with Presselite and their urban augmented reality apps.
• Dismoiou, an interesting French geolocalisation alternative to Foursquare.
• Nomao for its content and innovative local search engine concept.

What’s the idea behind Cityzeum?

Cityzeum means “City is an open air muZeum”. One of our aims is to describe with accuracy and loyalty most of travel places around the world thus encouraging people to travel. In order to do so, Cityzeum is building up web and mobile portals to help internet users prepare their trip with complete travel guides, book their hotel close to attractions, and download content for free. We have helped more than 10 million travellers within two years through the websites Cityzeum.com (travel guide portal), Alundi.com (weekends in France) and Babeltrip (smart deals)

What’s your background and why did you decide to start the site?

The company was founded by mobile multimedia service and culture specialists and passionate travellers as well. I worked for several years within the Telco industry (startups, telecom operator, consulting…) in business development. Vincent Gaudin, my partner, had some technical and product responsibilities also in the telecom industry.

How is the company funded?

Cityzeum is a self financed start-up, 100% owned by its founders. The traffic growth is around 10% per month over 18 months, reaching nearly 800,000 monthly visitors, expecting to double in the next 12 months for the French version. The company may raise funds to expand its growth more rapidly through new services, international launch, more content, and much more technology.

What are the unique features?

Cityzeum.com (launched mid-2007):

• Browse rich travel guides (60,000 places – photo, video ,audio guide, forum, user generated attractions description and comment, blogger experience, event, professional content.
• Find accommodation close to attractions (100,000) – hotel, short trip, vacation rentals, rural.
• Download free travel guides (400) – print-style or MP3 audio guides, include addresses for GPS devices and through applications onto mobile phone, PDAs and iPhone.

Alundi.com (launched Sept 2009) is a portal dedicated to France, with nearly 5,000 weekend ideas (visits, attractions) and events.

Coming soon we have a new web 2.0 site dedicated to tourism, almost a mash-up between Twitter, travel forums and a basic travel guide, enabling professionals and DMOs to establish powerful relationship with travellers.

In the battle against your competitors, what do you think are the two or three things that will help you to catch up?

The battle is quite aggressive in this industry, but we rely on strong assets to survive and soar:

• One of the most important travel places database with 60,000 content items.
• A unique technical platform operating our web and mobile portals and optimized for search engines.
• Innovation is one of our leitmotivs.
• We try to concentrate our efforts on the added value for the end user.

What are your thoughts on international expansion?

Even if we think that the market is local, we have translated a part of our database to English and Spanish for now. We will then launch our full services in these languages in a few months, thus reaching more than 2.5 million users/month by the end of next year.

Are you working with any of the travel sites and other aggregators?

In terms of hotels, weekends, trips and car rental, we work for now with a limited number of partners thus proposing around 100,000 ways to spend a night at destination. With content we produce our own and also aggregate material from independent sites/DMOs/content partners.

What about wider international trends around e-tourism – mobile, augmented reality, travel social media, trip planning?

The market is really busy, but with a few sites only proposing alternatives to main travel agencies. Our thought is that the market will evolve soon (in less than 18 months) with more attention paid to the needs of the end-user and customer acquisition costs.

This revolution will go through, provided the services remain simple, fun and with added value (mobile geolocalized services, trip planning, social networks, travel TVs, widgets) and quality multimedia content (a mix of UGC and professional content).

France is well known for its historical assets and cultural tourism. Do you see some convergence between cultural tourism and technologies? Any good examples?

We’ve just launched Cityzeum on iPhone. This basic, rich, fun and easy to use application simply tells you what to do/what to see around you, and targets mostly cultural tourists – and it’s free.

Any additional thoughts – a special message to the Tnooz international audience?

Please send us your thoughts on our sites. We really appreciate end-user and professional feedback.