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Travelmyth Helps to Discover Hidden Gems

This week in our travel-tech start up series we meet Stefanos Vesdekis and John Nousis from our Travel Massive Athens Chapter, Co-Founders of Travelmyth. Stefanos and John help travellers to discover hotels that they’d enjoy but would have never discovered if they’d used other hotel search engines. 

Stefanos and John are serial entrepreneurs having started their first start up online back in 1998 when the internet was still an unknown world for Greece. Being innovative and hard workers with a vision to inspire and be inspired, they are now an important business in the Greek entrepreneurial scene.

Last month they traveld to San Francisco for the eTourism Summit as TravelMyth was one of 5 start ups on the panel discussing “Bright Shiny New Objects: PROMISING NEW PRODUCTS, TOOLS AND APPS”.

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Who is your startup for?

For travellers who want to search for hotels based on their interests and preferences.

How did you build your startup?

Travelmyth is the 8th startup we’ve built since 1998, so we used our experience to save time and money while building our product. As we both write code, the first step was to write the algorithm that ranks hotels, and then we had to build the user interface to then add content. In the meantime we had to close partnership deals with the online booking sites to be able to offer price comparison and monetise our service. We launched Travelmyth in private beta for six months and then we opened the site to everyone. Since the first wireframes, we test and analyse the usage of the product and based on these data we improve it every day.

How is your startup disrupting the travel scene today? 

It’s a new way of shopping for hotels based on what you like. Our approach of ranking hotels is different. On other travel sites, the hotels are ranked according to their rating, their offers or how much they pay them. If you’re looking for a spa hotel for example, other hotel search engines filter the results so that hotels without spas are not displayed, but the rest of the hotels remain in the same order that they were in the original search. With Travelmyth, if you select spa, we rank the hotels according to which hotel has the best spa.

Additionally, we have content that cannot be found in other hotel search engines. We try to explain why each hotel belongs in each category. For example, if a user searches for castle hotels, he/she can find information such as when the castle was built and its history. We have already written more than twenty thousand information cards.

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

Every day counts, start today and be prepared to compete in a very competitive environment.

What is the most important thing during your travels?

STEFANOS: I try to understand how people’s everyday life is like.

JOHN: For me it’s the level of awareness. Sometimes while traveling, people try to do so many things and visit so many places that they really forget to live each moment of their travel. So in the end they just get the experience of watching a documentary rather than living the whole experience.

How do you think we can be better travellers?

STEFANOS: By not planning every detail beforehand.

JOHN: By being active participants in local life rather than observers.

Finally, why do you travel?

STEFANOS: Because of my desire to better understand the world, myself and those I travel with. Learning new things about cultures, people and places satisfies my curiosity and I always return home a better person.

JOHN: I love every aspect of travel. Firstly, there are very few things in life that can keep you a happy person for your whole life span. I truly believe that the experiences you get by traveling is one of those things. Secondly, traveling is guaranteed to expand your mind. The people you meet, the different cultures, the way other people think, the new business ideas you see while traveling are all things that can help you think better, more clearly and more openly. Lastly, travel is a bridge between reality and imagination. You spend days or even weeks preparing for some trips and imagining how it’s going to be like. When you get there, most of the times you realize that there is a great difference between what you imagined and what the reality is. Sometimes this surprise is positive, sometimes negative, but every time it is a brain exercise that can widen your thinking and your imagination for the next time.

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How did you hear about Travel Massive?

We had heard about Travel Massive long before the first meeting in Athens was organised, so we joined the first meeting and every meeting since then. Actually we gave the first ever presentation about Travelmyth at a Travel Massive event in January. It was a sneak peek into what we were building at an early stage before opening the private beta. We’ve also attended an event in Berlin and now we’re checking if there is any Travel Massive event in every city that we visit.

As a startup, what benefits have you seen from being a part of Travel Massive meet-ups? 

Except for the obvious benefit of networking with travel professionals, Travel Massive is a great platform to present Travelmyth for the first time in public and to get valuable feedback. We’ve also met a talented travel blogger at the last event in Athens with whom we’re now working with together.


Tech Startup is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel-tech start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Stefanos Vesdekis and John Nousis on Travel Massive, Facebook or Twitter

 


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