SafeTravels Connects Travellers and Organizations 24/7

Chris Reed, Founder of SafeTravels, provides a way for travel companies to engage with their customers before, during and after their trip.

Chris is part of our Melbourne, Australia chapter and here to tell us about how exactly SafeTravels makes travel easier for both travel organizations and their customers.

Who is your startup for?

SafeTravels is an app for travel agents and group tour operators to provide to their customers. We have also recently added a functionality that lets travel companies link product offers to their itinerary in the App, creating new opportunities to sell products to their customers while they are travelling (things like hotel transfers and day activities are commonly added as product offers).

What inspired you to create this startup?

SafeTravels started as an app for travellers to create an Emergency Travel Profile and securely share this information with other travellers.  In the event of a travel emergency, your contacts can access your important information (such as travel insurance, emergency contact and medical information) on their phones – even when offline.

This feature remains a core component of the SafeTravels app and we have a large user-base who uses the app primarily for these features.  Over time, we were approached by several group tour companies about utilising these features as part of their trip management procedures, and on talking to more and more companies, we identified a gap in the market for a ready-made, low cost mobile app solution that was focused on the traveller, not just a way to provide trip information.

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

SafeTravels is different from other travel apps in that our functionality is centred around the user profile.  This provides a much more enriched experience while using the app and allows travel companies to engage with their customers while travelling.  

We are now in the process of expanding our product offer functionality – to create a “concierge platform”, allowing travel companies to take advantage of both their knowledge of when/where their customers will be and their user profiles, to send them targeted product offers.  For example, a customer may book a Surfing Lesson in Bryon Bay, and when they arrive at their next destination in Melbourne, they will automatically be sent a product offer in the SafeTravels app for a Kite Surfing lesson in St Kilda.

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

Hang in there!

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

I was surprised when I first joined Travel Massive that Melbourne had a fairly large travel tech community and there are a number of travel tech start-ups where we can share knowledge and in some cases have incorporated each other’s services into our platforms.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Chris and SafeTravels on Travel Massive and on their website.