Build Your Trip Itinerary Your Way With TripHappy

Calvin Hawkes, Co-Founder and Lead Developer at TripHappy, helps travelers plan better trips, plain and simple. Right? That’s why we’re sharing Calvin’s startup story.  

Calvin is a member of the Travel Massive San Francisco community and is interested in creating positive connections within the travel industry. Interested to hear his story? Read on!

TripHappy is for anyone looking to plan a trip that fits their own style. If you are sick of apps that plan out your complete itinerary for you, curated Top 10 lists and review sites that claim to know what you are interested in, there is TripHappy.

What inspired you to create this startup? 

We are building TripHappy up to be the largest database of the world’s travel itineraries. While other sites have tons of information about activities within a city, complete itineraries are still hard to come by, so planning a full multi-city trip isn’t very easy. Most travelers also either prefer to hit the most popular places, or set off the beaten path. Currently, it’s hard to distinguish between the two from reading blog posts or TripAdvisor reviews. So we built TripHappy in a way that allows you to see the relative percentage of travelers that go to any city and the activities they do in those cities, so you can follow the crowd or get away from it.

How did you build your startup?

My two co-founders and I have been building TripHappy while traveling for the last 12 months. We started out in Asia, spent 4 months in Africa and have now been in Mexico for the last few months. Building the company on the road has been amazing and allows us to get tons of feedback from other travelers we meet. It’s also been pretty challenging as well. With the internet issues, a few rounds of food poisoning, and getting detained by the police in China after we were accused of being hackers for the US government, we’ve certainly learned a lot over the last year. Actually, a lot of the features we’ve added to TripHappy came straight from pain points experienced on this trip.

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

TripHappy focuses heavily on real traveler data to help users make decisions, rather than curating the info ourselves. Too many travel startups today attempt to pick activities they assume you will like or that fit your ‘traveler persona’, but ultimately leave you with an incomplete list of cities or sights. We make it as easy as possible for travelers to get the information they need to plan their own unique trip.

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

Thankfully a lot of travelers have the same views as us when it comes to planning trips, so we’ve seen pretty steady growth in users since we launched. Other than that, we’re focusing on content marketing and long-tail SEO to drive new users.

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. You can connect with Calvin and TripHappy on Travel Massive, Facebook, and Twitter.