The coronavirus pandemic has put a strain on many industries, but perhaps no area of the U.S. economy has been harder hit than travel. The travel industry is expected to see $505 billion in losses by the end of 2020, and the industry is not expected to recover until 2024.
As business and leisure travel came to a screeching halt this spring, it left travel businesses scrambling to find ways to survive during a global pandemic.
But for Chicago startup TripScout, Covid-19 has not spelled disaster. In fact, it's forced the company to connect even more securely to its audience of would-be travelers and double down on content that would grow its audience.
Founded in 2015, TripScout acts as a centralized place for travel information and inspiration.
The TripScout app pulls articles and videos from top publishers, along with content from local Instagram influencers, to provide travel insights on more than 100 destinations across the world. Users can save any restaurant, tourist attraction or other point of interest with one tap, allowing trip planners to easily create a personalized itinerary.
Last year TripScout raised $2.1 million from Sam Yagan's Corazon Capital, 500 Startups, M25 Ventures and others.
TripScout is designed for trip planning, but it's also intended for aspirational travel. Co-founder Konrad Waliszewski likened TripScout to the "Netflix for travel," designed as content destination for travel junkies year-round.
That focus has helped TripScout weather the coronavirus better than companies that rely on everyday travel to drive customers.
But even still, traffic to its app took a "major decline" in the first few days of the pandemic, Waliszewski said. Six months prior to the virus, TripScout was growing its user base 50% month-over-month.
Determined to keep growing its audience, the startup shifted gears. It began producing a "Travel from Home" video series where the company would interview a variety of travel celebrities, Michelin-starred chefs, vloggers and more, producing two to three live virtual events a week.
The startup also doubled down on its social media presence, creating and posting travel content on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.
A year ago the startup had around 1 million Instagram followers across a variety of travel accounts like Iceland.explore and Chicago.travel. Today TripScout has more than 3 million followers across more than 100 Instagram accounts dedicated to highlighting travel experiences in cities across the world.
"Attention and engagement is the most valuable and hardest-to-get currency in travel," Waliszewski said. "Even though people are not traveling, they’re still thinking about travel, probably even more than before."
The company has been able to survive 2020 without making any cuts to its eight-person team, Waliszewski added.
Waliszewski said TripScout is focused on growing its audience across social media and will increase efforts on its core app in 2021 as travel begins to steadily increase.
To further increase its travel offerings, last week the company acquired Uncharted, a San Francisco travel blogging platform that's described as the "Medium of Travel." The company allows users to create individualized travel itineraries.
But the longer the coronavirus persists, and if people continue to feel uneasy about jumping on planes and staying in hotels, many travel companies will struggle to grow. Waliszewski believes the key to a leisure travel rebound will be access to rapid testing that gives travelers confidence about their health status throughout their trip.
Work travel, however, may be a different story.
"I think business travel fundamentally never recovers," Waliszewski said, adding that most work trips and board meetings can now be easily replaced by Zoom calls.
But Waliszewski remains bullish about the future of leisure travel and believes TripScout is positioned to thrive as a resource for people looking for their next adventure--whenever that time comes.
"Right now is going to be most disruption in the travel industry since the internet came around," he said. "Ten years of change will happen in the next year or two."
