A new travel app wants to help you plan your next trip based on recommendations from your friends, and it's raised a round of funding from some notable investors to kickstart its growth.
Out Of Office, a new Chicago startup that officially launched this week, helps you decide where to stay, what to eat and other travel activities by seeing what your friends recommend. It raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round led by Austin VC firm Brand Foundry, along with Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, former Orbitz Chief Product Officer Chris Brown, ex-Havenly COO Jessie Dixon, and Liz White, the chief customer officer at Ashely Stewart.
Founded last year by Janine Seale and Coabi Kastan, Out Of Office aims to create a one-stop-shop for trip planning, from inspiration to creating an itinerary to booking your trip. The app allows you to add your own travel history and recommendations, and to invite and follow your friends who add and review the places they've been. The goal is to create a social network where users can decide where to travel and what to experience based on what their friends endorse.
Out Of Office lets you create a trip itinerary and share it with others, along with creating wishlists for future trips. Users can currently book restaurant reservations in the app through OpenTable, and eventually the startup plans to offer in-app hotel and airline bookings.
The idea is to offer a travel app that eliminates the need to scour Instagram, Trip Advisor and endless Google searches to plan your next getaway.
"We set out to create a company that's an end-to-end travel platform that begins with inspiration from friends and an inner circle that matters to you," Seale said.
Despite the size of the U.S. tourism market—a roughly $1.7 trillion industry—both Seale and Kastan, two avid travelers, couldn't find a travel tech tool that simplified the trip planning process.
"We travel often. We spend a lot of our disposable income on travel," Kastan said. "But there was no consumer lifestyle travel brand that really resonated with either of us."
Seale and Kastan both previously worked at Trunk Club, each spending about seven years with the Chicago fashion upstart. Kastan also spent time at Cameo as its VP of talent relations, while Seale served as the VP of revenue at interior design company Havenly. The two jumped full-time into Out Of Office last spring, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was underway and international travel was effectively shut down.
"At the beginning of our process some people looked at us a bit sideways for starting a travel company in a global pandemic when the borders were closed," Seale said. "We always believed there would be a travel rebound no matter what. It wasn’t a question of if, it was a question of when."
Travel has indeed rebounded from its 2020 lows, even as Covid-19 variants keep life from returning to pre-pandemic norms. But traveling amid the coronavirus has created an even bigger need for a tool like Out Of Office, Kastan said, as planning where you stay, and what you do, needs more forethought than ever before.
"Covid reinforced the need for this," Kastan said.
The startup, which hopes to attract 100,000 users by the end of its first year, is working with influencers to help drive growth and interest in the app. It's currently pre-revenue, but expects to make money through affiliate booking fees, ads and other revenue sources down the line.
Out Of Office's funding is also significant for another reason: Seale, a Black woman, is now among a group of less than 100 African American women who've raised at least $1 million in venture capital funding.
