TapTrip
Taptrip is a business travel startup which aims to make the search, booking and expense management process more efficient for small to medium sized companies.
U.K.-based Taptrip was founded just over a year ago and has seven employees. It has signed a string of partnerships in recent months, including WeWork and Kiwi.com. It also won last year's Business Travel Disrupt Award.
Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.
Taptrip’s free-to-use online booking tool for small to medium sized enterprizes (SMEs) allows customers to search and book travel, track employees and record expenses using just one platform.
Taptrip does business travel and expenses differently. Founders Neil Ruth (Skyscanner, IHG and mentor to WeWork Labs), Thomas Young (Booking.com and serial entrepreneur) and Jack Timblin (Sky Betting & Gaming) set up TapTrip in 2018 to make business travel frictionless for SMEs.
Integrations with Kiwi, Skyscanner, Uber, Booking.com and Omio mean that travel bookings centralize into one, easy to use, omni-channel platform, reducing booking time for journeys from 43 minutes to three minutes, whilst saving a business on average of £1,200, per employee per year.
We are disrupting business travel tech by bringing the personalisation and user experience of a service such as Spotify or Netflix, to the business traveler, whilst building in control for businesses, this has garnered industry accolades including Business Travel Disrupt Award winner 2019 at Business Travel Show and the best UK Startup at the HNT Awards.
What inspired you to create this company?
Our personal frustration at the friction of business travel. We’ve all worked in companies where travel was unmanaged. It was a free for all, lots of time wasted and purchased personally.
There was a huge financial risk every time, having to book the travel personally and then expense it at the end of the month, where in some cases you may not even get the full amount back!
Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.
- Strengths: We are building a strong team that has backgrounds from some of the world's leading online travel agencies and mixing this with technical expertize from the gambling industry, which will help us create a market leading product.
Key functionality of the platform includes:
Centralised travel bookings for flights, trains, hotels and taxis
Synchronisation of availability and bookings with traveller’s calendars
Tracked costs and automated spend reports
Expenses submission and approval in seconds
Sophisticated traveller tracking, 24/7 to fulfil duty of care requirements
- Weaknesses: We need to keep scaling and quickly. If we are slow to market, others will come. It's not a weakness, but instead, something as a team, we need to be mindful of. We need to keep moving quickly and not take our foot off the gas pedal.
- Opportunities: Too many to list. Unmanaged travel. Disruption of services. Personalization.... so so much more.
- Threats: Everyone in this space is investing heavily. Lots of cash around. The risk of change is that if a very large travel management company comes along and buys many of the new entrants, then the pace of change will stop/ slow down. Great for the founders but not so great for change in the industry.
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What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?
92% of SMEs do not have a travel policy and face too many barriers to entry, to enable them to work with a traditional TMC. Typically they are forced to use disparate systems, from kiwi.com for flights, to booking.com for hotels etc.
Receipts and confirmations aren’t centralised and that’s prior to logging expenses, manually.
Yuk. It’s time consuming, inefficient and laborious.
With Taptrip, businesses are able to centralize all of these services, build in spend control by way of creating a travel policy, confirmations integrate directly into the calendar of the traveller and expenses are automated in just two taps.
So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?
Ha, nice try but not telling ;)
Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.
We first looked at the personal problems we faced when doing business travel.
Having worked in SME's and larger enterprises there was a concurrent theme. No one liked the travel policy or the process around booking/expensing business travel.
Having spent a number of years in an SME with an unmanaged travel program we were all left frustrated. Booking across multiple online travel agencies and then compiling your expense report at the end of the month (I'd always lose a receipt somewhere).
We then spoke with SME's and understood our frustration was the same across the board.
In the UK alone more than £40 billion is spent on business travel. Of that number, more than £30 billion is unmanaged travel spend, which creates a huge opportunity for us.
Globally we've estimated that more £320 billion is spent on SME business travel spend.
How and when will you make money?
We are already making money. When our customers book their travel through us, we charge a booking fee and take a commission of every sale through our affiliate API partners. Longer term our vision is to create a business travel marketplace.
What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?
Thomas Young CEO - ex product manager at Booking.com working on marketing communications, pre-booked taxis and white-label partnerships.
- Previously co-founded Repairly that took investment from Techstars and Virgin Media.
- Personal aim with Taptrip is to create a company that solves a real customer problem and can scale to become the market leader throughout our segment
Jack Timblin CTO - ex Golang engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming working on transaction APIs for casino games
- Ex Senior Engineer at Purple WiFi working on collating location data at scale (billions per month)
- Personal aim is to create a high performing technical team that can disrupt a legacy industry with minimal manual intervention
Neil Ruth CCO - launched Skyscanner into Israel and led global strategic partnerships with a suite of enterprise consumer brands
- Launched IHG's flagship property and new brand to the UK: Staybridge Suites, which acted as a template for eight other properties to be built and launched across Europe.
- Personal aim is to redefine the perception of business travel, leveraging market leading technology to emulate the personalisation and user experience of a service such as Spotify or Netflix and make this the new norm for the business traveler.
What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?
As a startup finding the right content partner is difficult, had it not been for our previous backgrounds in travel, we wouldn’t have been given the inventory needed to start the business.
Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?
It’s about building the right team that will build a company that solves a real customer problem.
From the start we focused on the team first. You can have a class A team and a class B product and they will most likely succeed, but if you have a class B team and a class A product, they will still most likely fail.
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