Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner have been in the travel booking business for long enough to know not to bother trying to compete with the likes of Booking.com or Expedia.
But in coming up with the concept for their early-stage startup, Plannin, they figured if they had a unique twist, they probably could leverage their industry connections.
The brothers-in-law started a business earlier this century called HotelsByCity that was sold to Priceline.com in 2008.
From Plannin’s website: videos by travel influencer Christopher Raney of Yellow Productions offer potential travellers information and reviews on sights and accommodations.
They continued working for Priceline and built a 70-person operation for that company in Winnipeg that still runs its partnership solution business that generates more than $1 billion in revenue.
For Plannin, they were thinking about how to leverage the audience social media influencers have and direct it to the sale of hotel rooms.
“We worked on a product for Priceline that helps companies sell travel through Priceline,” Loewen said. “We are really trying to unlock the same potential here for our social media partners.”
The thinking was: if social media is all about capturing eyeballs, how could they harness that growing power of travel influencer/creators to help other travellers discover and book trips?
Before Plannin, social media could be an inspiration for people thinking about travel, but it is a platform optimized for viewing.
“We used to use Google to discover, now maybe we use Instagram or YouTube, but it’s a little broken,” said Loewen. “Social media is not designed to help me book a trip. It is just there to look amazing.”
If a social media post inspires action, you still have to go somewhere else to actually engage in the commercial transaction.
“So we said, if we are going to help social partners be part of the travel experience more deeply than just inspiration, we need to build a gateway so we can get then from views to booking,” he said. “That’s what we are trying to do with this platform: sit in between social and the booking experience.”
It’s early days, but it’s working.
“It’s is a unique way to drive traffic to a travel booking engine using social traffic,” said Schartner. “We are trying to keep finding ways to unlock more social traffic to our website and, hopefully, the content creators will earn on it.”
They have recruited about 1,000 influencers so far, mostly from North America and Europe. When a social media post is about a hotel or a review of a hotel, a Plannin link is embedded in the post of the creators who have registered with Plannin.
Through its connections with Booking Holding (owner of Priceline) — that company’s current and former chairmen of the board are investors in Plannin — travellers can register with Plannin, make their booking (Plannin is partnered with Booking.com, Expedia and other such sites) and receive discounts of as much as 50 per cent.
Plannin and the influencer split the commission, typically about 10 per cent of the price of the booking.
The influencer who originated the booking will continue to get commissions every time that traveller books any other hotel room through the Plannin platform.
Chris Raney, an Irvine, Calif.-based travel content creator with more than 350,000 YouTube subscribers, was on the road five of the past six weeks.
His Yellow Productions operation — his ubiquitous yellow T-shirts helps him get recognized in tourist spots around the world — is lucrative enough to afford to have a full-time editor on staff.
Founders of Plannin: Andrew Loewen (left) and Randy Schartner
In addition to the Plannin link prominently displayed in the description section below the video, Raney will occasionally do a 30-60 second “commercial” for Plannin.
Although a straight-forward content creator like Raney can make a good living, it’s a very competitive business.
“The challenge, particularly in the travel creator industry, is that the tourism board might give you an all-expenses-paid trip to wherever but they don’t pay for my time,” he said. “Plannin is a great affiliate program to help support the channel.”
Plannin has only been live for a few months, but Raney is getting commissions for bookings every other day.
Jordan Blake, a Missouri-base travel creator who specializes in Las Vegas in his Show Me Vegas channel, is also an early Plannin adopter.
He and Raney are both conscientious about maintaining credibility. For instance, both avoid recommendations or ratings of properties if they’ve been comped the room and both say the Plannin connection will not influence how they will portray any property they talk about.
“If I can make a recommendation for a hotel and help the viewer save money on a booking, that’s a win-win,” said Blake. “If I can get a little commission at the same time, all the better.”
Loewen and Schartner have done a couple of capital raises and figure they’ve got a couple of years of runway to grow the business. (As well as investments from the most senior ranks of the travel industry, Toronto venture capital firm Golden Ventures — run by ex-Winnipegger Matt Golden — is also an investor and board member.)
They are focused on growing the ranks of influencer partners, as well as adding restaurants and cruise ship verticals in the coming weeks and months.
“We just want to keep growing, adding creators on board every day, building new tools all the time,” said Schartner.
“As long as we keep on in that trajectory, we’ll build another big business in the city.”
Martin Cash
Reporter
Martin Cash is a business reporter/columnist who’s been on that beat for the Free Press since 1989. He’s a graduate of the University of Toronto and studied journalism at Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University). Read more about Martin.
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