Our Investment in Plannin
We’re excited to announce our investment in Plannin, which marks the launch of their creator monetization platform.
Plannin helps travellers discover and book trips with recommendations and discounts from the creators they trust, allowing creators to unlock earnings from the decisions they influence. We’re thrilled to partner with Randy Schartner, Andrew Loewen, and the entire Plannin team alongside other incredible travel executives, including Jeff Boyd, the former CEO and Chairman of Booking Holdings.
Randy and Andrew have a long history in the travel market. Together, they previously co-founded HotelsbyCity, which was acquired by Priceline in 2008. Post-acquisition, Randy and Andrew grew the Priceline Partner Network to over $1.4B in volume. Through their deep expertise and experience at the world’s largest online travel agency, they recognized a sea change due to the fast-growing creator economy. Travel and lifestyle creators are influencing an outsized number of travel purchases, yet, these creators–and especially the long tail creators–lack a meaningful and scalable mechanism to participate in the revenue they are generating for the industry. Further, there is no easy way for the creators or influencers to make travel offers directly available to their captive audiences. Leveraging their almost two decades of experience in the travel market, Randy and Andrew decided that they were best positioned to build a next-generation, equitable travel company and decided to launch Plannin.
The Travel and Lifestyle Creator Opportunity
As we investigated the $475B online travel market, we were taken aback by the staggering number of creators and influencers directly or indirectly influencing travel decisions. Travel is one of the most popular categories of social media content — on TikTok, the hashtag “travel” boasts 74.4 billion views, and on Instagram, 624 million Instagram posts are travel-related. In fact, 37% of Gen-Zs state that their primary source of information when planning a vacation is social media and many more use it as a source for inspiration. It’s no surprise that travelers are gravitating to the platforms where their peers are sharing recommendations, with 30% of 18 to 24-year-olds and 40% of 25 to 34 year-olds considering themselves to be content creators. The size of the creator economy is a $104B market with over 303M creators worldwide, but 71% of creators still make less than $10K annually by their second year of building an audience.
The Plannin Solution
Plannin’s mission is to help creators and influencers unleash the earnings from their travel-related content by connecting with their audiences through a simplified platform that showcases improved discovery and discounted offers. A unique aspect of Plannin’s product is that it rewards creators for both initial and ongoing bookings from their audience that they refer to the platform — providing them with a cookie free, lifetime attribution model.
We love backing founders who have worked together before, and not only is this the case with Andrew and Randy, but they are also brothers-in-law. As a founding team, they are deep domain experts, mission driven and high execution — and they are building a culture that reflects all those qualities. As a former Winnipeger, I’m always thrilled to support companies being built in Winnipeg. Plannin will make it our fourth Winnipeg-founded investment, joining Joist, SkipTheDishes and Callia Flowers.
If you know any travel or lifestyle creators or influencers, please direct them to Plannin so they can start getting a fair share of the business they create.
