This has been an exciting year, for the travel industry as well as for us and that means we had plenty of stories to share. Newer brands made as many headlines as the established names and there were many highs and lows.

Looking back at this year, we have created a round-up of our most popular stories to refresh the events just in case you missed them.

#1- Plenty of investments

Many travel startups got a strong start to the year 2015 with heavy investments by both foreign and domestic investors. While the investor activity slowed down near the end of year, there were some newsworthy investments earlier. We compiled an infographic of the funding raised by the popular travel startups in different categories. Read full story.

#2- Twitter lessons from AirAsia India MD & CEO

Mittu Chandilya is the young Indian at the helm of AirAsia in India. While working his plans to make India operations the largest of AirAsia subsidiaries, he also actively engages with the customers on social media to ensure quality of service and customer satisfaction. We spoke with him to learn a thing or two about using social media right for an airline brand. Read full story.

#3- Year of budget stays

Budget hotel startups were the highlight of this year. This segment saw the entry of multiple players trying to revolutionise the way we look at the low cost hotels but at which some of them picked up pace, it was clear that the OTAs won’t be happy. They were gaining the power to leverage volume to their advantage, something that wasn’t seen in the hotel space at this scale until now. Read full story.

#4- OTAs hit back

Like we said, the OTAs didn’t appreciate the idea of letting the budget hotel aggregators feed on them. Before the startups could do serious damage, some major OTAs blocked them cutting one of their major source of bookings. Read full story.

#5- TripAdvisor takes a swing

It is not at all easy for the OTAs. The hoteliers don’t like them even when they drive large share of bookings. Not only the budget hotels but their friend TripAdvisor also entered the same playground. Lower rate of commissions and better visibility were enough incentives for smaller players to skip their name and shake hands with TripAdvisor. Read full story.

#6- Conversation with Winnie Tan, Tripzilla

The Singapore based company started in 2010 and quickly went on to become the favourite of outbound travellers in the region. Along with that they are also a good example to look for on how to use content right to inspire travellers. Recently they also launched a flight metasearch engine which gives the OTAs a pass and offers only direct deals. Read full story.

#7- Stayzilla shifted focus to alternative stays

India based accommodation booking platform Stayzilla took a strong focus on homestays and other alternative stays options this year. With the message of ‘Make room for something new’, they are actively inviting the people to start adopting the fast approaching shared economy trend. Read full story.

#8- Marketing lessons by the industry experts

There is something seriously wrong in following the patterns. There is no one strategy that can fit all brands and the marketers should stop pushing the same buttons. Marketing experts like Taranjeet Singh, Country Business Head, Twitter India and Terrence Voon, Director, Marketing Activation, Singapore Tourism Board shared some strong pointers for promoting a travel brand. Read full story.

#9- British Airways social media blooper

British Airways made lot of news this year, social media campaigns, new Dreamliner place and more. But one social media mistake made the strongest headlines for them. British Airways got strong backlash on social media after they sent a predrafted tweet to cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar and stayed for quite a while in the twitter trends. Read full story.

#10- Technologies for the road

Driverless cars, especially the Google ones were also in the headlines every now and then. If and when they come in, the travel industry will see major transformations. While we were waiting for these autonomous cars to arrive, we also listed down some other technologies that are coming to our cars soon. Read full story.

We have got lot of exciting things lined up for the year 2016 and for a start, we have already announced Startup Knockdown Mumbai and there will be more coming soon.

The post 2015 Round-up: Most popular stories of the year appeared first on TravHQ.

The travel and tourism industry plays a significant role in the economy of Singapore. Last year, this country received 15.1 million international visitors who had spent more on sightseeing, entertainment and gaming. Visitors had shown more interest on longer and mono-destination stays. Being one of the most popular destinations of the world, Singapore has received international awards from Lonely Planet as ‘World’s Top Country to Visit in 2015’, from CNN as ‘Top 10 Destinations to visit in 2015’ and from New York Times as ‘Top 6 out of 52 places to go in 2015.

With the rapidly growing Singaporean tourism industry, many travel startups have come into existence and expanded their footprint in 2015. We have listed a few of them below as a part of our Travel Sprint series:

#1 Very Local Trip

Founded by Maxime Besnier in 2014, Very Local Trip is a unique platform that connects travellers with open minded and enthusiastic locals who are ready to share their knowledge of the city’s local culture and food. It helps the travellers avoid the general tourist spots and experience different places as insiders. Their website lists many activities as per the destinations. The activities include Streetfood trails in Chinatown, Bangkok Urban experience and Sticky Waterfall Trip. Interested travellers can take a look at the descriptions of the activities, check reviews and then book an activity of their choice. If you believe in experiential travelling, do check out its website.

Language: English

#2 Travelog

Launched by Matt Kwa, Jason Yoo, Young-Un Cho and Robinson Park in 2014, Travelog is an insider’s travel magazine. Trippers can use them to know more about the cities they are about to visit, the delicious dishes of different places and recognise the hidden hangouts of the tourist destinations. Although the company started out in Singapore, they do have active presence in regions such as Seoul etc. In-terms of content they cover most of asian countries.

Language: English

#3 Flocations

Founded by Shaw Chian, Florian Cornu and Venkatraman Dhamodaran in 2011, Flocations is an online travel discovery tool that helps the adventurers discover the best travel packages. It aggregates the travel packages from the local agencies of the countries as well. The users have filter options to search the different types of packages based on themes such as adventure, beach and family. Interested travellers can use their wide filter searchability features to book the best travel packages of their choice.

Language: English

#4 TripZilla

Launched by Winnie Tan in 2011, TripZilla is an outbound service for people planning to travel from Singapore planning to other countries. Travellers can find itineraries and packages like group tours and land tours by multiple agencies and compare them against each other to pick suitable ones for themselves. There are innumerable deals for flights, hotels, package tours, cruises as per the destinations. To further attract trippers on its website, it has an online magazine with travel stories.

Language: English

#5 PandaBed

Founded by Lester Kang and James Chua in 2012, PandaBed connects travellers with the property managers of apartments, villas and private residences. Travellers can find an inexpensive rental place to stay by getting in touch with the hospitable and helpful hosts. The website has an interesting ‘PeerMatch’ feature that allows travellers and hosts to get connected with each other on similar preferences like culture and language.

Language: English

#6 BeMyGuest

Launched by Clement Wong and Blanca Menchaca in 2012, BeMyGuest is Asia’s leading provider of tours and activities. The brand has partnered with many individuals and thousands of small-to-medium sized travel businesses to offer travellers a wide variety of travel options from the most popular and mainstream tours to the locally specialised activities. A few interesting activities include: Underwater World with Dolphin Lagoon Experience, Night Safari with Tram and Adventure Core Waterpark. Travellers can easily book tours and activities available at attractive deals.

Language: English

#7 Roammate

Founded by Daniel O’Reilly and Hannah Ryan, Roammate helps solo travellers, couples and groups meet each other for tours, excursions, holidays, day trips and events. The travellers can find people with similar interests based on the compatibility test available on the website. They can even share their travel ideas, plans and costs through this platform.

Language: English

#8 Tripnatics

Launched by Bernard Ang in 2013, Tripnatics was developed to encourage the sharing of holiday experiences. The website allows the avid travellers to view, store and share itineraries. Beyond this, it offers reliable reviews by experienced travellers, a feature for finding like-minded travellers and help from ‘Circle of Trust’ to plan the trips.

Language: English

#9 Bon Appetour

Founded by Rinita Vanjre Ravi, Inez Wihardjo and Giovanni Casinelli in 2012, Bon Appetour connects travellers with local hosts who wish to invite guests over to their homes to join them for a dinner. The travellers will get to cherish a ‘home away from home’ experience and make new friends in the cities they are visiting. It gives an opportunity to host and easily monetise through their cooking skills and learn more about the different cultures of the travellers.

Language: English, Spanish, French and Italian.

#10 42Race

Founded by Zhou Mi and Augustine Chua in this year, 42Race is a one-stop portal for marathon enthusiasts. It simplifies the procedure of finding and registering for marathons, book hotels, plan for the trip’s itineraries by providing travel packages especially made for runners and their family and friends who wish to travel with them. This online travel agency (OTA) targets both Chinese and Singapore outbound marathon travellers.

Language: English

If there are any other travel startup that has grabbed your attention for its excellent performance, do share its name with us.

Also Read: Travel Sprint: Our pick of Japan’s 10 coolest travel startups

and Travel Sprint: Our pick of Hong Kong’s 10 coolest travel startups

The post Our pick of Singapore’s 10 coolest travel startups that stole the limelight in 2015 appeared first on TravHQ.

Tripzilla, the leading travel portal in SouthEast Asia has announced the official launch of FlyZilla.com, a flight metasearch engine. The platform allows travellers to discover and compare flight deals and is available for travellers from Singapore at this moment. While they aggregate all the flight deals for the selected route like any other metasearch engine, they fetch data directly from airlines and direct them to the operators’ website to book rather than sending them to OTAs.

At this point the searches on metasearch engines are dominated by prices from OTAs and the airlines are pushed southwards in the results. This gives the airline operators less chance to establish direct relationship with the travellers. This is a major problem for the carriers, especially for the low cost carriers that operate at slim margins.  According to Winnie Tan, CEO, TripZilla, direct booking is the future as more and more brands put in efforts to establish direct relationship with the customer. FlyZilla will fill the gap left by existing metasearch engines and will focus on driving more direct traffic to the airlines’ website and display their promotions.

(Read: In conversation with Winnie Tan, Founder & CEO, Tripzilla)

Low cost carriers offer interesting deals to motivate travellers to book direct with them and these deals are usually available for limited durations. FlyZilla will also focus on aggregating these deals on the platform for the users. The FlyZilla mobile app will use the push notifications to notify the users about such deals so that they can take the advantage of them.

According to FlyZilla, they have received very positive response from Airlines about the new platform. As airlines are getting a platform to grow direct bookings, they have shown support by offering flight tickets to run online giveaway campaigns. With FlyZilla, TripZilla is trying to reach more people at the booking stage to drive more revenues for the overall business. This is a very good strategy to generate quality leads for TripZilla.

FlyZilla beta was launched in April 2015 and has already served over a million searches and crossed 10,000 app installs. Users from Singapore can visit FlyZilla.com to look up flights flying out of Singapore. Alternatively they can download the mobile app for iOS or Android devices.

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Tripzilla has quickly become a big name since its inception in 2010. It is an outbound service for people from Singapore looking to travel to other countries. Users can find itineraries and packages by multiple agencies on TripZilla and compare them against each other to pick a suitable one. For people who aren’t looking to book, they have got an online magazine with stories to drive travel inspiration.

We got in touch with TripZilla’s Founder and CEO, Winnie Tan, to understand how they have evolved in the market and what are the new trends that they see in the industry. Here is an excerpt from the conversation.

TripZilla has evolved a lot ever since it initially burst on the scene. How do you see the evolution since your inception phase?

We started with a travel classifieds portal for tour packages and travel deals, our target audience being travel consumers who are in the ‘booking’ phase.

After becoming the market leader for travel classifieds in Singapore, we started the TripZilla Magazine product, which is travel content and stories, expanding our reach to target travel consumers in the ‘inspiration’ phase as well. Our mission of “Inspiring Travel and Making it Happen” encapsulates our ethos as Southeast Asia’s leading travel media platform for consumers at every stage of their travel research and booking.

Content plays a significant role in TripZilla’s journey and you have about a million plus monthly visitors to the magazine. How have you grown to that level? Can you share some insights on what contributes to your traffic?

Our content focusses on our ‘Southeast Asia niche’. There are tons of travel content out there but not many sharing authentic travel experiences from the perspective of Southeast Asian travellers. We also use content marketing strategies similar to viral content giants such as writing good headlines, shareable content, A/B testing etc.

How much of a contribution is your content making in driving your business?

Content generates 60% of our overall traffic. Although some may argue that ‘booking phase’ traffic is worth much more than ‘inspirational phase’ traffic, but more importantly, the content product allows us to reach out and sell to new clients like the airlines, hotels and tourism boards who are interested in expanding their reach and building their brand online.

You enjoy a significant market share in Singapore but recent trends do indicate emergence of new age startups as well as international players. What’s your strategy to gear up to the competition?

We differentiate by going very local in our products and content. For example, our travel classifieds lists travel products from retail travel agencies in Singapore. We cover local travel events and aggregate flight deals from airlines targeted at the Singapore market. The big players do not have direct access to such content and this is a strong value proposition that helps us attract local travel consumers.

In a recent interview you claimed that there is a lag in adoption of technology in our region as compared to west. How are you trying to bridge the gap?

The consumers in Southeast Asia have switched to using online, mobile and social media for their travel research and bookings. The retail travel agencies and the tourism boards have not yet fully embraced online customer acquisition and digital marketing and branding as yet. Our classifieds portal and e-magazine are new media channels that travel businesses can tap on to engage the fast growing digital audience.

There is a recent growth trend of “Activity Planning” startups in the region. What’s your take on that?

It will be difficult to pull off. Because you need a lot of (activity) content to have a usable activity planner. Then, there is a matter of gaining consumer traction, and also having to figure out how to monetize the product at the end of the day.

2 years back you had forayed into Malaysia, how is that market growing?

The classifieds portal is growing slowly but steadily. We are looking to see if we can localise our magazine to get more readers from Malaysia. Perhaps, one of the ways can be producing Chinese and Malay language travel content.

Lastly, what are you key learnings from the customer trends & behaviour you see on TripZilla’s website?

At the moment, mobile users are growing, and content marketing on social media is the new frontier for user acquisition for TripZilla.

TripZilla is available for people in Singapore and Malaysia at this point. You can check out the Tripzilla Magazine if you are looking for some travel inspiration.

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