Japanese start-up Trippiece allows like-minded people to plan together

Meet Trippiece, a Japanese start-up that allows people to share their travel plans and plan trips with like-minded people. It received investment from Tokyo’s Samurai Incubate in 2011.

While the website is in Alpha stage in Japanese, Ryutaro Yokoyama (Manager) says they are aiming to make the website available in English and will expand their reach in Asia in the next few months.

Trippiece began with an idea from Founder & CEO, Ian Ishida. Ishida is a student from Tokyo’s Chuo University who also manages a Non-Profit Organisation (NPO), Unoneicchi. Once, he organised a tour to Bangladesh and realised he was able to gather a number of students whom he had not met within a short time. The tour was made up of several elements which were not offered by any existing travel agents. Even though there wasn’t much notice before the trip, Ishida managed to, satisfyingly, organize a trip that consolidated the interests of almost everyone in the group. This was when he realized the opportunity of letting individuals organise their own tours online.

The start-up began with four people including Ishida (pictured right). Kenta Suzuki, the CTO, graduated from Keio University in Semantic Web and Ontology Engineering and is very interested in web application development. He runs the implementation and architecture for Trippiece.

The in-house Designer of Trippiece is Mizuhiro Kio, an Intermedia Art and Science student from Waseda University. He has designed websites and smartphone applications for several companies prior to Trippiece and is currently in charge of site visuals and user interface for this startup.

The final member of the team is Ryutaro Yokoyama, a Business Management student from Waseda University. Ryutaro, who’s lived in England, Nepal and the US, is responsible for the overall strategic planning and direction of the company.

Their experiences overseas have contributed to the way they have developed the concept ofTrippiece.

According to the team, the problem with the tourism industry is while there are people who are eager to visit new places or find new activities with other people, the services and products that accommodate these varied demands barely exist. The difficulty comes from the fact that the industry cannot yet seem to figure out exactly what the consumer wants. By allowing consumers to propose what they want to do themselves, the industry becomes more aware of the demands of the consumer.

Trippiece comes in by creating a platform for consumers to express where they want to go and why they want to do so. People who then have ideas can choose to share them and create a plan. If they are lucky and there are others who have the same passion, the trip plan could be accomplished together.

Their initial target market is 18~24 year-olds in Japan, the group that has the most available time to travel and might be highly likely to use the service provided. They too have the most probability of making the service a ‘trend’. In Japan, there is a tendency whereby people who attend university belong to various communities, called Circles. These circles are hugely defined by their interests ie, people who likes traveling will belong to travel communities. Trippiece hopes that by targeting the right circles, the members will use the service to build their own travel plans. This might then lead to plans that are based on the various interests, adding “colour” to their service.

Following that, Trippiece aims to target women aged 24 – 35. They believe that women create unique travel plans that deserve an interest category of its own. These will consequentially help attract other women travellers to use their service. While the travel plans coming from this sector may not have volume, Trippiece believes this group of travelers tend to plan expensive trips, adding more variety to their offering.

Having worked on Trippiece for over a year, Yokoyama (left) has seen a variety of tours planned by their users. This includes planned tours to visit the tsunami-hit areas in Japan and helping in the survivors’ relief efforts on a voluntary basis.

According to Yokoyama, Trippiece has renewed the website several times and through the experience, they have determined that demand for such a service exists. They were able to get regular feedback from users which have greatly helped their development. They were also fortunate in getting the investment from Samurai Incubate before the launch of their website. As of January 2012, Trippiece has also secured another ¥5 million in seed funding.

Trippiece makes money through transactions of travel activities and tours purchased through their website. Advertisement slots are also sold for revenue.

Trippiece is currently focused on engaging users. They plan to launch an information resource hub specializing in self-planned travel experiences. This is expected to receive the attention of more potential users and to bring them to the main portal. The current service is provided free on their website. Trippiece is looking to explore possible business partnerships with travel agents and travel enthusiast groups such as Tabippo.com.

On international expansion, Yokoyama says, “Japanese people may feel better in using products and services with an Asian flavor. Similarly, I think Asian people may feel better using Asian-made web services compared to those from Western countries. Through our experience-sharing platform, we hope to have Asian travel enthusiasts on the planning side, and more European travelers on the participant side of the flow.”

Note: The WIT Japan Executive Forum on May 25 in Tokyo will also be a platform to learn about start-ups in the Japanese online travel space.