Local Experiences was a pivotal milestone for Trip.Social. Realising there is a great potential locked inside each aspiring local gurus, we quickly got to work interviewing a wide range of individuals with interesting skill sets and world view to validate the idea.
The mission is to allow any individual that is passionate and has a story about where they live to tell others to become instantly hirable only by travellers, either domestic or international.
What we have built:
A complete marketplace that helps travellers find and book locals as their companion
- Solutions to ensure transactions are secured and everyone involved are protected
- Built in CMS for providers.
- Reviews & Release-of-fund mechanism
Tech stack & Integrations:
- Stripe Payments & Stripe Connect
- Digital ID by AusPost
- Firebase & Google Cloud
- React
- GraphQL & Apollo
- Adobe XD
- Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Hotjar
Challenges & Solutions
Things are not as easy as we original thought. Travel industry had come to a state that it set high entry barriers for any newcomers to effectively provide a service. Some of the biggest challenges were identified during our Business Opportunity Canvas session:
- Safety & Insurance: Two of the biggest reasons why travellers may not want to book a service, also the biggest huddle that individual local experience providers had to overcome before selling a service.
- Mitigating under-table dealing: what we can do so travellers and providers don’t deal directly and undercut our services
- Ease of transaction and transparency
Safety & Insurance:
After months finding the right contact, I finalised an agreement with an experienced insurance broker to provide us specific coverage similar to the like of Airtaskers and Uber, where the policy is only active during the service period and the most cost effective. It’s quite amazing to note that 9 out 10 insurance brokers we spoke to had no idea how to achieve what we were trying to do.
Furthermore, we also integrated with Australia Post latest product Digital ID to perform KYC on all providers and applied ‘verified’ status to checked individual.
Mitigating under-table dealing:
The best way to mitigate these type of behaviours is the combination of:
- A vibrant and plentiful of services
- Ease of use for travellers and providers
- Safe & Insured, everyone is verified and protected if they dealt on our platform
Ease of transaction & transparency:
Utilising Stripe Escrow service, we held and release payments upon transaction completion. This adds another layer of security and safety to our platform
Unfortunately, the project was launched just before Covid-19 pandemic causing the entire Travel Industry to almost collapse. In 2022, we repurposed part of this project to create Trip.Social’s Experience sourcing bookable products from partners such as Viator and GlobalTix. The iteration is now powering a new revenue stream. We aim to resume the entirely of this project by 2024.
