Along with its pivot to becoming a meta-search for travel packages, Flocations is hoping that its appointment of a heavyweight board of directors will help it get the traction it requires to scale.
This week, the Singapore-based start-up which started life as a meta-search for air fares, using a cool graphic interface which allowed users to see where they could fly to within a set budget, named Kei Shibata, Venture Republic and Shirley Wong from TNF Ventures as Directors, and Jixun Foo of GGV Capital as Advisor to the Board.
Shibata, who’s taken an investment in Flocations, said he was attracted to the company because of the cool technology and the energy of the team. He’s followed the company since they presented at the WIT Start-Up Pitch two years ago and believes that partnerships between local entrepreneurs and industry veterans – combining ideas and execution – will change the whole paradigm of travel start-ups in Asia.
“With Flocations, I realised their positioning has to be different. They are very energetic, young and passionate, they come up with cool ideas but they don’t have the industry experience and management – my role is to work with their ideas to build a more realistic model.”
A more realistic model means the business has got to find a way to make revenues. While the graphical search feature was cool, many industry pundits said it was merely a feature that could be copied in an instant by companies such as Expedia which obviously has deeper, richer content.
Eric Koh, co-founder of Travelogy, another travel start-up aggregating tour packages, said of Flocations at the time when he was judging StartUp Asia 2012, “My comment was that searching for flights by budget was just a feature and not a business model. There are no barriers to entry, if they proved that consumers do want to search by price, Expedia and the flight companies could add that feature in a matter of days. Furthermore, these flight companies will have accurate data, whereas Flocations had to scrape the prices and therefore their data may be outdated.”
A look at their website today shows a very different proposition from when it first launched – clearly meta-search which seems to be all the rage these days. It is also Shibata’s area of expertise. His company owns and runs Japan’s leading online travel search engine, “Travel.jp.” as well as a user generated online hotel review service, “Hotel.jp” and a comparison shopping engine, “coneco.net.”
The three Venture Republic websites attract more than 15 million visitors each month. Shibata began his business by bringing offline travel agents into the online field, experience that Flocations clearly hopes to leverage as it attempts to do the same with its new model.
The other director, Jixun Foo, is also no stranger to meta-search, he is an investor in Qunar, China’s leading online travel company and is the Managing Partner of GGV Capital. “Online travel is fast growing and still has massive potential in Asia, as only 20% of travel is sold online. In addition, mobile is changing the way consumers consume travel. What I like about Flocations is their ability to consolidate travel package inventory that is not even online yet and couple it with inventory that is online, which ultimately reduces friction between users and service providers.”
Wong, meanwhile, believes that “Flocations’ business is very scalable and that’s key to centralizing in Singapore and easily expanding throughout South East Asia”.
Wong, the founding Partner of TNF Ventures, is active in the start-up scene working with a number of start-ups to help them secure funding, access resources, build market connections and go to markets.
Said Shaw Chian, technical co-founder of Flocations, “Travel packages are the last bastion of offline travel. Our clear success shows that bringing travel packages online is working”.
In the last two months, Flocations has had 125% organic growth month over month and the site converts 10% of visits to sales leads for their partners. In June 2013, it claims to have sent more than S$1,500,000 worth of sales leads to local travel agencies.
There are sceptics of course who believe that trying to aggregate travel packages in South-east Asia will be as tough as cracking the air problem as Flocations tried to do from the start but then, Shibata said that the same was said when he tried to do the same thing in Japan.
“Any meta-search which cannot differentiate other than aggregating data will die,” he said.
Flocations beefs up to take meta-search battle into a new area
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