THE founders of Jamaican start-up travel company, Antullia, believe their firm could one day be a leading Caribbean-based business that serves the world.
The founders of the search engine that focuses on leisure travel, Christopher Whitfield and Marlon Gichie, plan to jet off to the World Summit in Ireland where they will show their prototype to some of the largest technology companies and investors.“Our goal is to showcase our travel search prototype to investors and experienced tech entrepreneurs who can give us feedback and make us better entrepreneurs,” said Whitfield, the company’s managing director.Antullia seeks to capture the market of travellers who have no idea where or when their next getaway will be. It will provide visual search results with contextual travel information based on people’s interests.This represents roughly 50 per cent of discretionary travellers in developed markets and nearly 66 per cent in emerging markets, according to Whitfield, who learned about these findings from PhoCusWright, a travel, tourism and hospitality research company.Rather than allowing users to search for hotel rooms based on a particular date, Antullia will go even further to show travellers the kinds of activities that are happening in or around the area that are within their budget.“When we present people with the right information they will book with us,” Whitfield reasoned.The company aims to earn income from contextual video advertising and commissions on hotel room bookings and in-destination tours.The available travel agencies and search engines options don’t produce the information that travellers want, according to Whitfield.“If a leisure traveller goes to Google and searches for “luxury Caribbean resorts”, the search results they get are usually based on which resort has the best search optimisation campaigns,” Whitfield explained.Moreover, actual travel websites focus primarily on price, limiting their decision to cost rather than value.“Those are problems that are causing well documented frustration among travellers,” he said.Though Whitfield knows the company’s idea is feasible and there is a demand for user friendly search engines that turn specific results, there is still much more to be done before the site is put to market.“We’ve spent just about two years on whiteboards and writing code to develop our first prototype. There are a number of steps between prototype stage and taking it to market but we will go to the summit with it,” he said.For now, the founders of Antullia are more concerned with forming relationships and building the right product rather than seeking investments.“Our aim for the programme is not initially financial. The travel industry is extremely complicated and fragmented and even if we were to have an investment of US$1 million tomorrow, it wouldn’t necessarily mean we’d be successful,” he said.The company got into the Alpha Programme of the Web Summit, which gives early start-up companies a chance to exhibit their products and services.Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, PayPal and EBay are previous attendees.Following the gathering in Dublin, Whitfield will attend the World Travel Market in London to make contacts in the travel industry.Rather than allowing users to search for hotel rooms based on a particular date, Antullia will go even further to show travellers the kinds of activities that are happening in or around the area that are within their budget.View the original article here
Local travel start-up focusing on vacation interests, not dates
