Portico — A New Way To Travel

The ultimate travel organizer that helps you save, plan, and share amazing adventures, all in one place.

~Big thanks to Jacqueline Hampton, Founder & CEO, of Portico for all of her insights into the Boston-based venture!~

The Problem

While 80% of people enjoy researching travel, 70% get overwhelmed. Ideas end up scattered across emails, texts, notes and more. We must “make do” with subpar apps or spend many hours putting it into a spreadsheet, plus more time coordinating preferences among co-travelers. It’s a frustrating, time consuming process that is laden with FOMO and additional stress due to COVID. More time is lost after the trip to compile favorites for friends who ask for recommendations.

What The Company Does

Portico is the ultimate travel organizer, providing a central place for your entire life in travel that turns the chaos of travel planning into delight. Portico provides easy idea capture and organization, collaboration and sharing before, during and after the trip, original content from our team and local partners, and intelligent planning and maps…leveraging technology to simplify each step. Users have expressed their excitement in comments such as “Portico was my lifeline during lockdown” and “I used to hate trip planning, but with Portico I love it.” Portico is also exploring collaborative filtering and other data science approaches to leverage saved user intent data and deliver personalized inspiration.

Market

Leisure travel is a multi trillion dollar market globally. Domestic leisure travel spend for the US was $555B in 2020, down 25% due to COVID, and each year over 140M people in the US research travel online. Portico will tap into digital travel sales, which for the US were $115B in 2020, along with digital travel advertising, which for the US were $3B in 2020. Portico’s key competition includes manual spreadsheets and apps such as Wanderlog, TripIt, TripScout and Tripsy. In contrast to these players, Portico’s consumer centric approach to the entire travel journey differentiates them. Users regularly compliment their intuitive, holistic approach to travel. Travelers use many sources for ideas, and Portico is the only platform that lets you save articles and websites, even Instagram posts or TripAdvisor pages, in addition to places, notes and emails. Portico provides the ultimate flexibility in organization, along with intelligent alerts in planning and multi-device usage. They are also one of the few creating original content to both inspire you and showcase local partners.

Business Model

Portico captures data from ideation through travel for its community, and this first-party data has incredible value to advertisers and in considering personalization. As its community grows, Portico intends to launch multiple revenue streams. One path being explored is a freemium model that still enables Portico to capture significant intent data. A second possibility is native advertising — they’ve spoken with local tour providers, who have indicated strong interest in finding consumers in places other than social media. A third is affiliate bookings, which Portico started experimenting with this past summer.

Traction

COVID spurred travel dreaming and Portico tripled in size in 2020. Portico’s community is over 6K users globally as of the end of August, up 125% year-over-year. User engagement is at all-time highs, with monthly active users up 172% year-over-year (20% multi-device usage) and weekly active users up 250% year-over-year. Moving into the next wave of delivering value add to their users, Portico recently partnered with Context Travel, who delivers tours with experts for the intellectually curious in over 60 cities across 6 continents, as well as Pack Up + Go, the leader in surprise vacations, to provide unique offers to the Portico community.

Founding Team Background

Founder Jacqueline Hampton previously was CEO of Springpad, a personal organizer with over 5M registered users, which she hacked for travel planning. Before that, Jacqueline ran Corporate Development for Time Inc. and spent many years in media and entertainment investment banking for Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Portico wouldn’t be possible without CTO Julian North, who for over 20 years has been building online marketplaces and data oriented systems, with travel experience at lastminute.com, Travelocity, Sabre and Eviivo. Head of Product See Lee, who has in-depth knowledge of multiple industries and company sizes having worked in product at premier Boston companies including TripAdvisor, Catalant, and Fidelity.

The Ask

Portico is always looking for advocates who believe in the benefits of meaningful travel and making it easier to do so. Whether as a potential partner, customer or investor, Portico is happy to chat with you. As Portico starts to explore personalization efforts this next year, they’re also interested in people with expertise in AI / data science. Connect With the Portico Team

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