Emily Geiger has one word for the current state of the travel industry today: "Messy."
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions, as 2020 shutdowns have led to a slew of pent-up demand in 2021. But come next year, the market is poised to explode, many experts say. Messy, put another way, is more like music to an entrepreneur’s ear.
Enter Vitamin Collective: a new Pendleton-based venture-building startup factory founded last year by Geiger, a health care and startup industry veteran. Vitamin Collective is looking to create a whole portfolio of new travel-related companies, with plans to play later in other big market categories, and just launched its first official studio, RoadX Lab.
Geiger has the street cred to get the company off the ground. She most recently served as VP of BigCo innovation at Cintrifuse, working with corporations, hospital systems, cities and municipalities, and before that, ran Spry Labs, a health care-focused startup lab born from Cintrifuse.
Vitamin Collective “flips the traditional innovation model on its head,” she said. Unlike traditional incubators and accelerators, Vitamin Collective collaborates with founders, corporate partners and investors. It forms “themed studios” and plugs in a network of experienced entrepreneurs to build around the new company idea.
Overall, Vitamin Collective hopes to create 10 companies in the next three years. Its stretch goal is to "build, back, support or fund" 100 companies in the next five. Future studios rollouts will likely focus on health care/wellness and fintech.
“It’s a much less lonely experience as a founder,” Geiger said. “It speeds up the process and costs a lot less time and money.
“We’re trying to take all the non-value added stuff off their back, like hiring people and operations and finance,” she added. “It lets them focus on building the best, most interesting, most fundable proposition.”
RoadX Lab has so far attracted a handful of founders, both new names and those familiar to the StartupCincy scene. The studio is backed by the AAA Club Alliance, the third-largest member club affiliated with the AAA national federation.
Geiger approached the AAA Club Alliance in late 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak. Vitamin's specific focus is “travel working,” which enables people to work remotely while vacationing, and “microtripping,” for those who want to take smaller trips more frequently.
AAA Club Alliance is banking on the fact that the $8.9 trillion travel industry will rebound mightily and with new vigor. Geiger said the pandemic has created a “once in a decade” opportunity to tackle a market facing fundamental change.
“It’s really a pivotal time. It’s still noisy and messy and people are scrambling to remain relevant,” she said. “There aren’t necessarily clear winners in this next version yet. And AAA is saying, ‘we believe in this market theme.’”
Specifically, Geiger said:
- People are looking for more authentic, one-on-one connections. Existing booking mechanisms, like Priceline, Booking.com and Tripadvisor are “very centralized and corporate.” People are seeking local advice on travel.
- People want to travel locally yet uncover new things. For most U.S. travelers, road travel has also become the preferred means of transportation. A summer 2021 poll by AAA said road travel was expected to increase more than 52% compared to 2020, with a majority in the respondents’ own home region.
- It’s not just one big family vacation. People want to go explore four, five, six times a year — maybe even more.
- Employees increasingly want autonomy of location, and Covid has created long-term remote working problems.
“The rules of engagement have changed,” Geiger said. “We’re looking for things that would be relevant in five years no matter what.”
The Cincinnati market hasn’t exactly been flooded with travel-related startups. The most prominent name, Roadtrippers, an Over-the-Rhine-based digital road trip planning developer, was acquired in 2018 by RV maker Thor Industries (NYSE: THO), when Thor formed a new joint venture, Togo Group. It's been mostly quiet since.
Geiger isn’t bothered by that fact. Roadtrippers alumni are a valuable resource, but there will be representation from people outside that immediate circle.
“This isn’t only a local model,” she said. “I think we can attract big, national companies, and we can attract national talent here. You can also look at it as either someone who knows the marketplace or someone who has built a marketplace before. If you think about the (latter), we have that here.”
Joining Geiger on RoadX is Brandon Agranovich. He’s a Miami University graduate, Ohio native and ex-Google employee who currently lives in Boulder, Colo. Konrad Waliszewski, founder of Chicago-based TripScout, a travel planning and discovery app, a company that just closed a $2.3 million round in March, is one RoadX’s advisers.
Since beginning to recruit talent for the lab, more than 100 candidates have applied, and Vitamin has employed over 20 people on different projects — people who came by way of some pretty scrappy networking, she said.
She declined to name any of the projects, since they are in early stages.
But the concept could easily create a flywheel effect and attract more people — and new flashy founders — to the space, Geiger said. Travel is arguably one of the most relatable places to start.
“When things are still messy, it’s fun to talk about what could be next, because a lot of people, even non-innovation people, are curious,” she said. “It’s a fun place to be.”
