When Emily Brockway heard Marc Escapa talking from the podium of a pitching event preceding the HBS New Venture competition, she raised her eyes and straightened her back.
"It caught my interest because I, like most people, love travel and really identified with the problem he was trying to solve on a consumer level," said Brockway.
"I, like most people, love travel and really identified with the problem [Marc] was trying to solve."
Escapa, at that time a fellow MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, had been playing around with the idea of a travel startup since the summer of 2016, but it was only when he met Brockway - who had just come to the Boston area after her time at Box, a publicly traded cloud company in San Francisco - at the beginning of their second year that things started to get more concrete.
The problem that brought Brockway and Escapa together (and later was explored in a series of meetings at the Harvard Innovation Labs) is "the ironic idea that vacation takes work to plan," as Brockway put it, "and building really great travels can be stressful."
In January 2017, the two teamed up to launch Noken – a startup that wants to free people from the hassle of programming vacations while maintaining flexibility and, most of all, a key feature of organized trips: affordable prices. The startup raised a pre-seed round led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, with the participation of Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund, respectively the student arms of General Catalyst and First Round Capital. After its first year in Boston, the company is now based in Manhattan.
The deal that Noken offers is as follows: customers go online and book their own flight. Then, they adjust the itinerary to their budget by purchasing a curated trip on the Noken website, which will later send customers an app with all the information about the places they will go. All the activities and hotels customers find suggested on the Noken website can be purchased at the same price people will get should they find them online, but Noken charges a $5 service fee per traveler each day of their trip. In exchange for the fee, customers get reliable suggestions about the places to see, the app to guide them during the trip and 24/7 concierge support.
"The curated trips have existed for a long time," Escapa admitted. "They would put you on a bus with this tour guide that has a yellow umbrella... In order to make it cheap and accessible, they had to put you in a pack with other travelers and chaperon you around; this is very frustrating."
"They would put you on a bus with this tour guide that has a yellow umbrella... This is very frustrating."
According to Escapa, this is the reason why millennials wouldn't opt to go on an organized trip offered by a travel agency. On Noken, he explained that travelers can still access the affordable prices of organized trips, but match them with the freedom of choosing your own experience and having your tour guide handy and offline on your phone.
Currently, Noken offers curated trips to Iceland with a second destination - Colombia - launching at the end of January, together with the final version of the app. By the end of 2018, Brockway said they will offer multi-city destinations in more countries, including Cuba and Greece.
