Our October Update
Hi,
Welcome to the update for October 2019. Let’s get started.
In this update, we’ll cover:
- Our new app update
- This Month’s Triip Metrics
- An appearance CEO Hai Ho made at a Madrid conference
- Additional press and Triip publicity
- China’s Crypto Bump
Let’s get started.
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App update
We’re pleased to announce the next phase of the Triip journey with our new update, which is live now.
We’ve added some fixes, but our big update here is our language capability. Triip is now available with a Vietnamese option.
Additionally, this update also has:
- a 5% rebate when booking with booking.com. Find out more on the Spend tab (the feature with the “new” tag)
- Some necessary bug fixes
Enjoy! Let us know what you think.
Download it here: https://link.triip.me/xKZfrEte4X
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Triip’s metrics
First, let’s go to the top line number: bookings are up this month.
In September, we completed 304 bookings. We’re ending October with 404 bookings this month.
We usually see about 100 new tours join Triip’s tour inventory on a monthly basis. However, starting at the beginning of October, we’ve decided to changing our tour listing process as a growth strategy. This month, we’ve added 543 new tours.
What we’re doing different: in addition to maintaining an open platform where anyone can list and deliver their tour, we’re proactively seeking tours and experiences relevant to our audience. Adding them on Triip gives these operators an additional channel through which clients can find them, and helps us deliver new experience to Triip’s travelers.
Other metrics we’d like to share:
- We on boarded 1,640 new users in October.
- Our users used the Lucky Wheel to spin nearly 60,000 times.
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CEO Hai Ho’s Madrid Address
In October, Triip CEO Hai Ho appeared at a conference in Madrid titled Shopping Tourism & The Economy. There, he delivered remarks to an audience composed of both industry professionals and government staffers.
Here’s an excerpt:
[Travel is] not a nation, we’re an industry. But the primary goal of industries is to be commercially successful, to make money. We’re living in a time now where we need to think beyond that. Can an industry be profitable as well as sensitive to the needs of the world? Can it be compassionate? Can it be attentive to its own philosophies? Can it see a future beyond the next quarter?
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Other Press
Digital startup krASIA’s latest feature: Triip and the necessary innovation that saved the company
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Triip’s unique business concept — a convergence of blockchain and travel — was built out of necessity. In 2016, the company was in a critical financial state despite achieving success offering local, one-of-a-kind tours in novel locations around the world. As CEO Hai Ho told krASIA “The competition in this travel industry is just absolutely fierce, especially for small guys like us, as most will eventually die after burning investors’ money on marketing efforts.
In 2014, despite having a presence in ten countries and listing 300 experiences, the startup was running out of cash, with GMV only reaching USD 20,000 that year. Hai Ho had to sell his only house to bootstrap the venture.
Even after Gobi Partners backed the startup in 2016 with USD 500,000, the company spent a large chunk of the investment on digital marketing, but Triip’s focus on offering localized tours still did not take off. The numbers just did not add up.
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Our solution: create a proprietary, one-of-a-kind travel system dubbed the Triip Protocol that would not only address this problem but also open the company to a brand new direction.
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The painful experiences of burning cash on Google and Facebook ads turned Hai Ho and Triip’s team to a new mission: They wanted to challenge tech giants by tapping personal data in tourism using blockchain technology.
Read more in krASIA’s piece below.
https://kr-asia.com/travel-startup-triip-me-wants-to-pay-you-for-your-user-data-startup-stories
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Can an app remind you to seek joy? Let’s find out
On the surface, Triip CEO Hai Ho’s first venture, a website theme store called 360themes.com, and his current business, digital travel startup Triip, could not be more different.
But what binds both together is a shared purpose to create and share happiness and joy.
“You see a long time ago before I started Triip, I created a community of 500,000 people. I was able to send personalized emails that included stories from people all around the world to motivate everyone,” he said.
A future update of the Triip app will include a push notifications feature. This won’t just be another phone-based bother. We’d like to do something special here.
“We want to make sure that we also send a message of positivity to you so that we can encourage you to become a better traveler, a happier traveler,” he said. “That’s something that I would like to spend my time, and I think you would too.”
Click below to hear more about it from Hai himself.
https://youtu.be/Of9o2xTDlVI
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China’s Crypto Bump
Fresh off the heels of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress related to his company’s involvement in upcoming cryptocurrency Libra, Chinese leader Xi Ji Ping made remarks suggesting that China ought to do more in the crypto space. Shortly after those remarks were made public, Bitcoin saw a surge in pricing.
What can we learn from this besides that blockchain responds well to high profile shoutouts? Zuckerberg’s address to Congress suggested that the U.S. was at risk of being left behind in the crypto space if they didn’t take a lead (specifically, by backing Libra). China’s interest in crypto could cause a big shift if they follow up and offer their own blockchain product. It’s something we’re watching and so should you.
Additional reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-and-chinese-tech-stocks-surge-after-xi-jinping-touts-blockchain-11572259762
