Longer stays, workations helping to fuel travel guide’s growth
GROWTH in vacation rental and Airbnb bookings in the US and around the world gave travel media startup Trip101 a strong performance in 2021.
The Singapore-based startup saw growth across all metrics in 2021 – 87% in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), 44% in revenue, and 90% in profit from bookings through its website despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kei Shibata: Focus on the US market is also paying off given it’s the largest market for vacation rentals and Airbnb bookings.
Kei Shibata, founder and CEO, put the sterling performance, especially growth in profit, to “efficiency of our business model”.
“We don’t facilitate bookings. We focus purely on demand generation and aggregation. And, most importantly, this model could not be created without our great team.”
Cost management also played a part in the profit performance “although we didn’t downsize our team in the last two years during the pandemic; our team has kept growing”, he said.
He’s also optimistic about the outlook, with Trip101 projecting accelerated growth in 2022 as Q1 saw GMV growing at 2.2 x YoY. The growth in GMV can be attributed to two travel trends that emerged from the pandemic – longer trips and “workations” (work and vacation), he said.
Asked if these two trends were being seen across all markets, other than the US, Shibata said, “The US has certainly been leading this trend but we’ve started seeing the same trend in many other markets. We do expect that this trend will spread and grow across the world into 2023.”
Over the last few years, Trip101 has deliberately worked to increase its penetration in the US market, which now accounts for 65% of its users. India and the UK are the next two markets. In 2021, the site reached audiences across 200 countries. The number of users visiting Trip101.com grew by 49% in 2021 compared to 2020.
“We’ve been keen to penetrate into the US market since it is the largest market in this category – vacation rentals/Airbnb – without question. At the same time, we are thrilled with the enormous potential in the other parts of markets including APAC. Our initial efforts have paid off so far. India definitely represents an example. In fact, we’ve been running some tests to localise our content to different languages.”
He said the growth in audience was driven by scaling article publications throughout the year, which brought the total number of published articles to 49,000.
As for how he sees travel media evolving, with the rise in social media content and social commerce in Asia Pacific in particular, he said, “I believe that travel media is definitely not excluded from the waves of commoditisations and consolidation happening across the travel industry.
“That being said, I predict that the travel media that can thrive and survive in the coming years will be the ones who can be really good at one thing. For us, it’s all about helping young and modern travellers in the world find the best and unique accommodation for their ever changing needs.”
