Organize and Share Group Trips with WeTravel

As part of our Tech Startup features, we would like to introduce you to Johannes Koeppel, Zaky Prabowo and Garib Mehdiyev who are part of our San Francisco Chapter and co-owners at WeTravel.

WeTravel provides tools for organizing, sharing, and managing group trips.

Who is your startup for?

Anyone who organizes group trips. This can be a yoga teacher organizing yoga trips to Nepal, business school students organizing an international trip to Latin America, independent tour organizers selling trips to customers across the world, etc.

What inspired you to create this startup?

Johannes organized group trips for tourists and found that there was no simple tool to help non-professional trip organizers like himself to organize, share, and manage group trips. It was a pain to coordinate the participants (e.g. send thousands of emails, get personal info such as visa status, dietary requirements) and collect the money (e.g. collect deposit, transfer/wire money). In the end, organizers had to use multiple available tools (e.g. googledoc, excel, paperwork, paypal/venmo etc) instead of one simple tool.

How did you build your startup?

Johannes came to the US in mid 2013 for business school (UC Berkeley – Haas School of Business) and set his mind to work on this idea. At the same time, Garib, an experienced senior engineer with prior experience founding a startup, also worked on his own similar travel idea . Zaky – Johannes’ classmate with experience in marketplace startup – then joined as the third cofounder to lead the customer acquisition. The full product was launched in August 2015. Immediately after, the startup was featured on the Financial Times.

How is your startup different from others?

WeTravel positions itself as the trip management solution for non-professionals.

There are tools out there for professionals and they come with a lot of features, functionalities and analytics but these are too complex for casual and semi/non-professional trip organizers.

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

WeTravel was part of UC Berkeley’s flagship accelerator when the cofounders built the beta version. Right after launching the full product, WeTravel won the highly competitive Foundation Capital’s Berkeley Founder Program that gave small investment and resources. We tried the beta version with several schools and received tons of encouraging feedback so we decided to pursue this segment.

Do you have any tips for new entrepreneurs who would like to start their own travel tech business?

There are limitless opportunities for your startup but you have limited time and resources. You’ll be enticed to pursue a lot of different consumers but stick to one type and serve them the best you can. Focus and prioritize continuously.

A note from the team:

We’re looking for more organizers of yoga/dance trips, student trips, and religious trips. Please contact info@wetravel.to if you know anyone.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community. Connect with the owners of WeTravel on Travel Massive.