Startup Journey: How CityPals connects travelers and locals

Launched in 2017, CityPals aims to change the way people travel by creating human connections between travelers and locals, through unique travel experiences.

Amotz Brandes started CityPals with his wife Denisa in 2017. He has always had an interest in how different cultures and civilizations function and interact, and holds a BA in International Studies. Amotz is a member of the Los Angeles Travel Massive.

Learn the story of how CityPals was born and how the concept has developed over the years.

What is CityPals, and how did it start?

The idea to create CityPals (www.citypals.com) came to us in 2016 on a beautiful summer day in Vienna while on a family trip to Austria and Slovakia. A childhood friend saw our Facebook posts and pictures from Bratislava and offered to take us on a tour of Vienna where he was living. And he guaranteed that both parents and kids would be entertained.

We had an excellent time with him, rekindling our friendship and enjoying an experience that only a local could provide. This sparked the idea behind CityPals: to offer a platform to connect tourists and locals, while giving both a chance for a friendship and companionship.

Back home in Los Angeles, we immediately started to design, develop, and then launch the CityPals website. Our first tour was booked in September 2017: A young Australian family with five kids hired a Manhattan CityPal to show them around the Big Apple and help them navigate the subway system and different sights. Steadily, CityPals began to register in more and more cities, and tour bookings increased. In June 2018,  the CityPals App was launched.

What attracted you to the travel industry? What did you do before founding CityPals?

I co-founded a company called Chameleon Associates in 2002, which provides security consulting and training. It has nothing to do with the travel industry, but I found myself traveling around the world more than 250,000 miles a year.

Traveling and working in different places, interacting with different cultures has always been an interest. Long before I decided to start a company in the travel industry, I was a major consumer of many different travel services and products.

How did you scale CityPals and develop both sides of the market?

When we started CityPals, we imagined it would be hard to bring locals to the website. We anticipated that would be a challenge. But it was much easier than we thought.

Actually, sites like Travel Massive have allowed us to reach local experts and guides that were interested in CityPals as a gig.

We advertised on Travel Massive’s Marketplace and on other local and international classified websites. This is how we got the initial seed of local providers. It has since been growing organically, for the most part.

To get travelers to CityPals we’ve used paid ads and social media. From there, we developed organically because if someone has a good CityPal tour, they share their experiences with friends who are themselves travelers.

At the end of the day, we are trying to establish trust, for the travelers and the CityPals. Organic growth comes when both parties trust the service.

They see that it works, the reviews are real, and that there is real value. The most amazing insight we receive is the fact that 99 percent of our reviews are 5 stars, and the remaining one percent are 4 stars. This proved to us that our initial intuition was correct. Travelers and locals want to connect.

What kinds of guides are you looking for, and who are your customers?

Because CityPals is an open marketplace, as long as our guidelines are adhered to, anyone can participate. The needs and desires of travelers are vastly varied. As diverse as the demand is for tours, services, and activities, so is the supply.

Our objective is to constantly facilitate this interaction smoothly, safely, and quickly. Customers for CityPal represent every type of traveler out there – business travelers, families, solo travelers, event-oriented, and more.

What’s another travel business that you admire, and why?

We admire apps like EatWith, which a great concept similar to CityPals, just food and hospitality oriented. All the disruptors that succeed to tap into something that is at the basis of human nature, in this case, connecting and sharing a meal together.

I admire many travel businesses that are small, generally offline and unknown and not part of the mass tourism industry. One of my favorite local travel businesses is in a Druze village on the Golan Height between the Israel, Syrian and Lebanese border. A Druze woman by the name of Mona, in her 60s, cooks traditional meals for small travel groups in her home and hosts them in her living room. She tells stories about her village, the Druze culture, and the geopolitical situation there.

I’ve brought travelers to her many times. Everyone leaves her house inspired, full, and feeling they had a genuine and unique cultural experience. There is and will ever be only one Mona. Those Monas across the globe may not have a website or even Facebook page but they have an incredible experience and story to offer.

Thanks, Amotz, for telling us the CityPals story!

Watch the video to see how CityPals works: 

You can find out more about CityPals by connecting with them on Travel Massive, or visit their website.