Describe both the commercial enterprise and generation elements of your startup.
GreatGuides is a market for adventure seekers to to without delay hook up with journey courses. Guides can set up their profiles, their trips, schedules, and fee options. Adventure vacationers can appearance up publications primarily based on their talents, ratings, journey histories, and customer evaluations.
Guides are qualified with the aid of GreatGuides primarily based on their abilities, barren region revel in, past patron scores and reviews. Guides working with tour operators on common get anywhere from 20% to 60% of the journey expenses. GreatGuides targets to disrupt the short‐growing adventure journey enterprise through letting courses control their pricing and allowing them to keep up to 90% of the ride charges. There aren’t any signal‐up fees. The greater trips booked by means of a guide, the larger the portion of the costs they get to keep.
The GreatGuides platform is constructed on NodeJS server technology with ReactJS in the front end and GraphQL architecture on Prisma at the backend. The application is hosted on AWS.
What stimulated you to create this enterprise?
In 2011, I went a multi-day hiking journey within the Ladakh and Zanskar region of Northern India. It took me numerous research to find executed publications that had been neighborhood to Ladakh and had been endorsed via different travelers. I desired to ensure that the publications have been trustworthy for me to spend eleven days in the wilderness.
I discovered a lot approximately the courses in the ones 11 days and their challenges and absence of enterprise possibilities as a journey manual. I desired to build a site that would advantage these courses and construct an enduring experience for vacationers. The idea stayed with me for some of the years until ultimately, in early 2018, I commenced learning into a journey.
There is high-quality growth worldwide in the wide variety of journey vacationers (30% in the United States on my own as consistent with ATTA’s Adventure Tourism Market Study). I placed all my efforts and self‐funded the efforts to construct out the GreatGuides platform.
Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) evaluation of the organization.
Strengths – We facilitate direct connections between the vacationers and the guide from the time the reserving is made. This is a differentiator than other adventure tour structures wherein you may not meet the manual until you get to the place.
Weaknesses – Adventure travel is a pre‐deliberate interest and vacationers are used to the traditional excursion operator model. It takes time to build trust with a new platform.
Opportunities – As per ATTA’s research, it’s far estimated that the worldwide journey tourism compound annual boom rate will reach up to forty-six % via 2020. The fashion has continued on account that 2011 with seventy-nine % of tourism forums reporting that journey tourism has begun to grow in their national market.
Threats – Major operators along with Airbnb and Google are focusing more on the adventure tour. This will threaten smaller operators
What are the travel pain points you are attempting to relieve from each the consumer and the industry angle?
Most vacationers on guided journeys get to realize their courses honestly well for years after their trips. That is why we cognizance at the guide’s story and their know-how. We alleviate the issues tourists have about traveling to far off locations without knowing who they will be spending their time and money on.
Adventure tourists care about where their money is being spent. GreatGuides guarantees that most of the people of the journey revenue goes to the manual and benefits the local area.
So you have got the product, now how are you going to get lots of customers?
Our preliminary cognizance is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We are just beginning with constructing site visitors from seek engine and show marketing.
Over the following one year, we’ll broaden and execute an outreach marketing campaign to travel forums inside the top geographies we’re concentrated on and top-rated destinations for the U.S. Adventure vacationer (New Zealand, Australia, South America, Western Europe).
We may also leverage tour agencies including ATTA, in addition to countrywide and regional tourism companies.
Tell us what procedure you’ve got long past through to set up a genuine need for your organization and the dimensions of the addressable marketplace.
We talked to a number of publications and journey guide specialists from around the sector to understand their ache points. Guides need to be on the sphere and would an awful lot as a substitute no longer take a seat in the front of a laptop responding to emails and do social media posts. We wanted to take the operational workload far from them and let them focus on leading trips.
As according to ATTA’s research, the whole marketplace length for Adventure tour is around $six hundred billion. This consists of smooth and difficult journey tours.
How and while will you’re making cash?
We take a percentage of every trip booked at the GreatGuides platform. We are constructing accomplice relationships with insurance companies and air and inn operators to build out additional sources for sales.
Our forecast is to start constructing sales within the subsequent six months.
What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding group, and why do you have what it takes to prevail with this commercial enterprise?
Atma Shetty is the founding father of GreatGuides. He is a technology and product supervisor with over twenty years of enjoying digital and organization transformation. He correctly application controlled business and digital tasks ranging in budgets from $three million to $45 million. He has led important programs and built company and purchaser merchandise at massive generation businesses consisting of IBM, Microsoft, Expedia, T‐Mobile, and Slalom.
