Country: Estonia
Category: Tourism
Name: Traffel
Project aim: We help people find cheapest long-haul flights.
What is the problem?
The average time people spent searching for cheap flight deals is almost 30 hours. It can be much easier to set up alerts to their preferred destinations and let Traffel.com do the searching for them. Traffel.com brings long-distance destinations closer to people.
Our solution?
Traffel.com offers their customers a large collection of the cheapest long-haul flight deals. Our team monitors almost one hundred travel websites, forums, blogs and ticketing systems in 20+ languages to compile the database. We do that semi-automatically, crawlers prepare info, but human handpicks the best deals. It´s a “real-time-offer” platform where customers can set alerts for their preferred destinations.
Where are we now?
To validate the idea we at first opened a simple website and started sending our newsletters twice a week to our subscribers, meaning we were selling subscription to a newsletter containing all the cheap long-haul flight offers starting from Europe. We started to see some traction (over 3000 subscribers with freemium and almost 400 paid subscribers) without significant marketing actions.
Traffel.com is our second website now. We have changed our twice-weekly newsletter idea into real-time offering (plus newsletter three times a week).
Traffel.com offers the following subscription plans: 24-hour access for €4.90; a month´s access for €7.90; and a year´s access for €60. We have paying customers from 16 countries in Europe.
What is the competitive advantage?
All other services on the market do not meet our needs – either they provide too little information or it´s presented poorly. We offer more flight deals compared to other channels. And we can find unique deals from different reservation systems and websites that do not exist anywhere else.
Other companies haven´t yet realized that you can ask money for this kind of information. We ask money from a customer and in return we provide maximum value (we save their money and time). At the same time we also provide some inspiration on where to travel next.
Next steps?
At the moment, our service is for flights originating in Europe, but we are ready to start offering the same service in the North America as we have the tools ready to do that.
It is great to win the Eurovision for Startups in Estonia and get recognized for all the hard work we have done. It gives energy to continue and develop our innovative model.
CEO of Traffel: We are looking at investors that will help us grow. At the moment we are willing to share 20% of equity for investment of 300 000EUR.