As part of our WiT Startup Spotlight series, we connected with Strabe who are known as the “CRM for business travel”, as it aims to create a platform that can offer corporate clients a ‘seamless business travel’ experience.
Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph.
Strabe is the new and better way to onboard, engage and delight corporate clients. We’ve built a platform that enables travel agency to provide true seamless business travel services to corporate clients. The software gives travel agencies the ability to onboard corporate clients online, receive automated travel requests in real-time and proactively book travel plans with minimal exchange; hence providing a seamless business travel experience to corporate clients by erasing the planning aspect of travel.
Who are your key customers?
We are currently working with travel agencies in North America, Europe and Australia. Our customers are travel agencies offering corporate travel services all over the world. We’re opening up the Asian market as well.
Who are your key partners?
We are currently focusing at becoming great one thing: Seamless Business Travel. We have the opportunity to become an extremely robust solution once we start partnering with key platform that complement our product and help us provide a complete solution. This is extremely exciting and motivates the team to keep improving our product and services.
What business are you most likely to be compared to?
Some of our customers refer to us as the CRM for business travel agency but we’re more than a CRM. Strabe has a lot more similarities with Asana because the product is designed to help travellers organize, track and manage their trip. Asana simplifies team-based work management, Strabe simplifies team-based travel management.
What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
The pain point we’re solving is the traveller’s productivity loss during the planning process. Business travellers read an average of five reviews before booking, taking approximately 45 minutes. Unmanaged travelers spend an average of 274 minutes booking air, hotel and car while travelers working with a travel management company take from 15 minutes to three days on average to book.
We aim to make it easy for travellers, by letting Strabe take care of the booking process so they can focus on adding real value to their business. In today’s travel landscape, change is the only constant. You expect better fares, reporting, savings and customer service, all using the latest technologies to save you time, money and trouble. Technology should make your life easier, not add more burden.
What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
N/A
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We are currently self-funded and we plan to go as far as possible without raising funds. Validation comes from paying customers, that’s the financial support we received from day one.
Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
Our idea was validated by customers. We initially built a smart calendar, and started selling it to businesses looking to improve their business travel experience. Through customer feedback, we realised that weren’t really solving the problem, we were adding more work for travelers. Now they had to manage two calendars and still spend time online making sure we are showing them the best prices.
We came back to the drawing board and came back to our initial insight: Business travellers are not in the business of travel. This helped us design a tool for people who are in the business of travel (travel agencies) and completely remove the planning process from corporate travellers.
Travel agencies are also facing a lot of pressure as many corporate travellers are expecting them to have a web and mobile interface. Strabe enables travel agencies to have a web and mobile portal that truly enhance the capabilities and the overall customer experience. Our offering resonates extremely well with their needs.
What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our current pricing model is $50 per user per month. We charge travel agencies; Strabe is free for corporate travellers. Every agency starts with a 14-day free trial, followed by a $50/user/month fee. No setup, installation, cancellation or other hidden fees. For growth, we’re reaching out directly to agency managers in English-speaking countries via emails, social media and phone calls and we’re investing a lot of resources in educating travel professionals about the meaning of seamless business travel through various form of content. Lastly, we are also relying on a great product and customer service to create a successful referral program and further grow our customer base organically.
What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
As far as total addressable market, the business travel industry is a growing market expected to reach $1,657 billion by 2023. Strabe supports agencies with a dozen of corporate clients to agencies with thousands of clients. The platform is built for scale and we’re investing resources in our support team to support the demand. Global business travel is expected to thrive, according to a report by a travel management group, as an improving world economy buoys confidence in the private sector and investment community. American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) is forecasting growth across the travel sector, including air and ground transportation and hotel stays, with higher fares and increased bookings supporting the industry’s growth. “The travel outlook looks bright as economic conditions continue to strengthen and growing business and consumer confidence translates into increased demand for travel,” GBT said in its report.
Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Strengths – Speed of execution is our biggest strengths. In the past 6 months, we’ve shipped more than 8 features and there’s still more to come. We are able to improve our product as we gather feedback from travel agents and travellers.
Weaknesses – Strabe is not currently integrated with other key platform involved in business travel: expenses, accounting, CRM, health tracking apps and more. The decision to not integrate from the start is strategic, we are focusing on mastering the seamless business travel experience before adding more bells and whistles to the platform.
Opportunities – We have the opportunity to become an extremely robust solution once we start partnering with key platform that complement our product and help us provide a complete solution. This is extremely exciting and it motivates the team to become the best at one thing: Seamless Business Travel; we’ll have an ecosystem around us to complete the product and improve the life of corporate travellers.
Threats – Current threats to Strabe’s growth are mainly travel professional beliefs about the true meaning of seamless business travel, and legacy technology companies locking down travel agencies to expensive multi-year client contracts without investing much in new feature development. We’re tackling the first threat by educating our audience about the true meaning of seamless business travel and we’re tackling the second threat by moving fast.
Who are the team members and advisors?
Strabe’s founding team as deep expertise in the travel industry and SaaS. Strabe is co-founded by Mathieu Jobin and Ned Nadima. Before Strabe, Mathieu worked at Uber as a Software Engineer where he helped push many high-profile features and Ned lead Growth Team at many ventures backed startups in Ottawa. We’re part of the Amadeus’ Next program and have access to some of the brightest and most experienced mind in the industry.
Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
We understand the meaning of seamless business travel, and we have the skills that are necessary to bring Strabe’s insights to the world of corporate travel. The vast majority of professionals believe that the business travel world would experience the same technological changes we saw in the consumer space. Business and leisure travel are fundamentally different.
For someone who only gets two weeks of vacations every year, it’s completely normal to spend weeks, if not months, to find the best destination and value for my dollars. Especially if you have to coordinate with friends or travelling with the whole family, it takes a lot of planning. Self-serve tools enable you to do your research, make sure it matches your tastes and even plan activities once you are at the destination. It is a big deal.
Business travel is fundamentally different, and for most road warriors, it’s something recurring. You know where you’re going, you’re traveling for a set period of time and most importantly, you are expected to work. So assuming that you will spend the time to find the best hotel, best car and wait for the best price to book your trip doesn’t make sense. For most companies, business travel expenses falls under the cost to either acquire customers or serve customers, which is justified by the positive ROI they get from it. Expecting travellers to download consumer apps to manage their travel plan is flawed, and we’re working hard to change the mindset of travel professionals.
What’s the motivation behind doing this?
We were looking for a true seamless business travel solution in our previous positions and couldn’t find one despite all the catchy taglines. We’ve realized that the entire corporate travel ecosystem assumed that travellers are in the business of travel; therefore they want to manage trips themselves. So business travel technologies should focus on self-serve tools that travellers can use to book trips themselves.
We believe that business travellers are not in the business of travel, they rely on the travel ecosystem to get them from point A to B, the same way I rely on my bank card to wire the money to the right merchant after a purchase. Expecting corporate travellers to do the heavy lifting during the travel planning process adds nothing but friction. We believe that seamless business travel is like magic, where everything happened in the background and my role as a traveller is to just show up. That insight is the inspiration behind our product and we do at Strabe. We’re on a mission to bring seamless business travel to every corporate travellers.
