Portland based travel startup TrovaTrip raised $5 million from investors as travel planning continues to rebound.
The round was led by Seattle-based PSL Ventures and included Elevate Capital and Oregon Venture Fund. Also backing the company are angel investors Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz worldwide and former chief operating officer of Uber; and Eric Breon, co-founder of Vacasa, both of whom are well versed in the travel industry.
TrovaTrip has developed a trip management and planning platform that connects trip hosts to vetted tour operators and then allows those hosts to sell trips to their audiences.
For instance, a photographer could take their audience on a trip to Costa Rica that includes photography classes as well as cultural experiences, said co-founder and CEO Nick Poggi. In TrovaTrip parlance the photographer organizing the trip is the host. The host can then log into a TrovaTrip marketplace to find a vetted tour company in Costa Rica that would organize the in-country logistics and itinerary.
The photographer then directs their audience to the TrovaTrip site to book and pay for the trip.
TrovaTrip was founded in 2017. In addition to Poggi, the co-founders are Lauren Schneider, chief revenue officer, and Brandon Denham, chief technology officer. The company has more than 200 hosts who have planned trips. There are 350 trips planned for the rest of this year and into 2022, Poggi said. The company saw bookings triple from 2019 to 2020.
“I’ve been lucky to travel through most of my life. It was critical in shaping who I am today. We wanted to find a way to make travel more accessible to others,” Poggi said. “Rather than create the experiences ourselves, we created the platform.”
And with that platform experts and influencers can create the experience and bring it to their audience.
With this funding, the company is hiring. It currently has a team of 35. It’s looking for engineers as well as sales and trip managers.
Like many in the travel industry, March and April of 2020 were scary months as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, travel restrictions were issued and stay-at-home orders came down. For TrovaTrip, bookings fell 75% at that time.
“March 2020 and April were painful,” Poggi said. “But we focused on connecting with our customer base (of hosts) and listening and understanding their paint points.”
For those experts and influencers many were seeing income drops as brand sponsorship and promotion pulled back, he said. With TrovaTrip those hosts saw an ability to control their own brand and income by setting their own prices and creating their own experience to share with their existing audience.
Investors in this round came from the existing network of Poggi, Schneider and Denham as well as from discussions with investors in the region and investors that the trio wanted to work with.
“The TrovaTrip team is clearly onto something incredible,” said Ben Gilbert, managing director of PSL in a written statement. “This is a consumer-based travel company that not only survived the pandemic but grew tremendously, offered new ways for creators to monetize, and are now helping people safely return to travel.”
