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North America, Travel Startups

Experience the Ease of Travel Planning With Travelnuts

This week we feature our first Outsiders Travel Startup. It is our aim to connect our Travel Massive insiders to a world of possibility. Meet Luca Beltrami, the COO and co-founder of Travelnuts. Luca helps travellers build their dream trip around their hotel stay seamlessly and while discovering new things. 

Luca Headshot

Luca is from San Francisco, so we encourage all our Travel Massive Insiders of our San Francisco Chapter to give a warm welcome to the team at Travelnuts.

Who is your startup for?

  • Travelers who like planning their trip without the pain of booking everything on separate systems and who love discovering all the great things they can do in and around their hotel before they arrive
  • Hotels who believe they are more than just a room
  • Service providers who want to be noticed at a crucial moment of travel planning

What is your startup about?

Our startup is about connecting hotels with their guests beyond the transaction of booking a room. At the time of booking a room, guests start a relationship with a hotel that can be very rewarding for both parties.

Hotels have a wealth of knowledge about what travelers do when they stay there. They know what is good, what requires advance booking etc. But not all hotels can afford a concierge that makes phone calls to all guests before they arrive. And even concierges could use a tool that helps them better discover what to offer to individual travelers earlier in the booking process.

Conversely, guests may either be looking to discover things around the hotel or they want to do specific activities that would require pre-booking on separate channels. We power those communications and transactions between hotels and guests.

tnuts tahoe

How did you build your startup?

We built it during a class at Stanford in which you incorporate the company on day 1 and then spend the rest of the quarter building the product and interviewing customers. From here we graduated into Progression Labs, an accelerator that is part of the Downtown Project in Las Vegas and then Stanford’s own StartX Accelerator. It’s been an immensely rewarding ride!

What makes your startup different from other similar startups out there?

We are taking on a category (tours, activities and other tourist attractions) that is still booked predominantly off-line. Many companies are trying to do this by building their own brands, portals and sourcing their own inventory. We work directly with hotels because we believe that the most important thing is offering a traveler the right thing at the right time in a seamless transaction that is easier than the off-line counterpart. That is the most important part to figure out.

How did you get your startup off the ground and gaining traction?

We started with one visionary hotel and a minimum (hardly) viable product that had a lot of manual moving parts. However, it was enough to show that guests care about this service and so we built it more and more robustly, gaining important feedback but also new customers and partners as the product looked and felt less like it was a class project and more like real, enterprise software.

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Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who want to create a successful startup?

Be very passionate about what you are doing. You are more likely to make money doing other things. Especially in travel 😉 Also, be very explicit about what you need to believe in order for your startup to be successful. At a time when you have the big OTAs fighting with Google and TripAdvisor for clicks and reach, even the statement: “I believe we will be able to generate x-amount of traffic” can be a leap of faith.

What was your first travel job?

At 19, I funded my college travels by working as a tour guide for EF Cultural Tours. I used to take North American high school students on tours of Europe. Groups would arrive in London and I would take them to Paris, Florence, Rome etc.

What is the most important thing during your travels? 

When I travel, I want to experience a city with all senses. The first thing I do whenever I get to a new city is to go for a long walk.

How do you think we can be better travellers?

I think respect for the destinations we visit is incredibly important. What makes me cringe is seeing people drop litter in national parks, or take flash photography in sacred places. With the wealth of opportunity that is unlocked by cheaper travel should come a sense of heightened responsibility for the trace we leave when we travel – on nature, objects and people.

Finally, why do you travel?

First, I travel to discover. I am incredibly curious about discovering new places, cultures, landscapes, foods, etc. It is part of becoming a more well-rounded person. Second, I travel to remain connected. Having moved around a lot internationally, travel is a necessary condition to see many of my closest friends and family. I naturally gravitate towards very international communities wherever I move, so most of my friends end up spreading out everywhere in the world.

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The Travel Start-Up is a weekly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Today we featured our first start up who has not yet joined the team, so please give Travelnuts a warm hello and we hope to see you at the next San Francisco Travel Massive meet Up. 


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