Trip-planning apps come and go but Gogobot could be one that is here to stay

The travel landscape is littered with failed trip planning apps but five-year-old Gogobot isn’t one of those. Today, the firm has ten million users who have posted over a million reviews and five million photos to the site. Metasearch revenues are up 211% year-on-year and firms like HomeAway, Owners Direct and TripCase by Sabre are integrating Gogobot content into their platforms.

Gogobot CEO Travis Katz, who is speaking in San Francisco this week, says that in the highly competitive consumer travel space, success has come from doing things differently and sticking to his guns.

Success has come from doing things differently and sticking to his guns.

On doing things differently, he says that unlike many other travel planning sites, Gogobot has never dished out a generic list of recommendations.

“Whether you’re a hedge fund manager or a backpacker, most sites deliver the same list of hotels,” he explains. “We decided to turn that model on its head.”

This was the idea behind the firm’s 19 tribes, which like ‘foodies’, ‘family travellers’, ‘backpackers’, ‘luxury’, ‘business’ ‘LGBT’ and so on. By getting people to share their travel style and personality type, as well as photos, reviews and recommendations, Katz argues that they have been able to surface what ‘people like you’ really want. Importantly, Gogobot recognises that people aren’t one-dimensional so tribes can be mixed and matched, and changed each trip.

Arguably ahead of his time, Katz understood the power of the personalised experience from day 1 and five years on the vision hasn’t changed. In fact, with the rise of the mobile, the most personal of devices, it’s become even more relevant. 

“People are increasingly time poor. They don’t want to be sorting through a whole long list of recommendations and the expectation from an app, which should know who I am and where I am, is even greater,” says Katz.

It’s really about digging deeper and getting beyond the obvious touristy spots to deliver people with relevant content.

Spotting opportunities

Most people don’t plan what they are going to do during their trip that far in advance, which means that many tours and activities firms don’t have an online presence. But the way people travel is changing. What Gogobot sees from its predominantly millennial audience is that people are increasingly looking for authentic local experiences. This is having an impact in the traditional tours and activities space.

What we are seeing from our users is that people are less interested in say the traditional hop on hop off bus tour than they were in the past

“What we are seeing from our users is that people are less interested in say the traditional hop on hop off bus tour than they were in the past,” he says.

This is partly driven by the fact that the mobile device enables travellers to navigate a place more easily, but it is also because people are looking for more authentic experiences. “They want to do what locals are doing, and that’s not a city bus tour,” says Katz.

Mobile has also meant that providers are now able to reach potential customers while they are in location.

“So it’s an interesting time for tours and activities and in some ways the time is right for take off, but I would say there needs to be a bit of an evolution in what providers are offering,” says Katz.

Going forward

In its five years of business, Gogobot’s vision of delivering personalised and relevant recommendations has remained a constant. It has also has remained committed to building a consumer brand. For this reason, it hasn’t gone the white label route in the way that many other trip-planners, that started life with a consumer-facing product, have. Even in recent B2B deals with firms like HomeAway and TripCase, which have integrated Gogobot to drive more regular engagement in their apps, the content is still branded Gogobot.

“We’re very focused on building a consumer brand,” says Katz.

And the money has come. Venture-capital backed Gogobot has secured three rounds of funding to the tune of $39 million and counts HomeAway, Redpoint Ventures, Battery Ventures and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors as investors.

So where is the money being directed today? One gap in the group’s strategy is that all content to date is in English. So although there is a global audience, its reach is limited to English dominated markets. But that, says Katz, is likely to change in the coming year.

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