Traveas - The Blog
This is a blog about entrepreneurship, delayed flights, the Internet, mobile services, business enterprising and why the power of traveller behaviour will change the whole travel industry.
Jack Melcher-Claësson is an Internet loving entrepreneur, a proud family father, a football freak (soccer that is) and the co-founder of Traveas. Traveas mission is to simplify every journey for travellers around the world.
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2008-11-26
We at Traveas now have deep dialogs with a majority of the leading business travel agencies in Sweden and the Nordics, as well as the leading leisure and online agencies. We are in test phase with many of them and we are in contract stage with a couple of them. We have also started up dialogs with players outside the Nordics, and even outside of Europe, and we are of course very excited about this fact :-)
The road to get where we are have been a damn fast one I agree, at least when you look at it calendar time wise. Key for us have been to package our services in a very easy way, combined with an transparent and transaction based business model. Fair enough.
However, the main reason for us to become such fast runners have definitely been the dialog with our clients, the agencies. You see, the essence of our first offer was indeed interesting (our business idea is still the same), but the business model and the go to market approach apparently had some major improvement areas :-) In fact, they have changed a couple of times during this period, based upon experiences from our client dialogs. Believe me when I say that we wouldn’t even have come 10% of where we are right now if we had stuck with that first offering. 
Photo credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/
Our clients (as well as potential ones) have given us so much important feedback of what´s key for them for a service like ours within their own portfolio. Without their valuable thoughts, smart approaches and different angles, and of course our own capacity to absorb their input, we would still be struggling with our first offer.
So I would like to give a big thank you to all you people with open minds and creative brains at the different travel agencies we have talked to the past 8-10 months. We would be nowhere today without you.
At the same time I want to give some healthy tips to other entrepreneurs out there before you spend to much time in the office. Don´t try to do it all by yourself. Don´t wait before you start making sales calls to your potential market. The perfect product doesn’t exist. But what I do know is that great businesses exists, and it comes from hard work of course but mainly it comes from talking to your clients and give them what they really want, not to force something on them that you wish they want.
So, hands on to you guys still struggling to make your power point slides perfect:
- Start making those sales calls!
- Start asking questions to your potential clients!
- Don´t forget to listen to the answers!
- Be agile!
- Don´t be afraid to change your business model!
- Again and again if necessary!
Good luck :-)
2008-09-29
Dear
Traveas friend,
At a very
early stage we knew that the services within the Traveas portfolio will
be global from day one. Even so, it´s hard to conquer the world in just a day
or two and we had to start somewhere. So, we launched a first public version of
TravelTracker in Swedish this summer, and just a couple of weeks later
we conceptualized and packaged our next service TravelPlanner for Travel
Agencies (I will tell you more about TravelPlanner in another blog post
within shortly).
Having done
so, we have noticed an increasing interest from users in other countries such
as the Nordics, the rest of Europe, the US and even Asian countries. They visit our site and blog and even with lack of Swedish language knowledge
they seem to be very curious about our service. Many of them have contacted us
to see how they can start using TravelTracker and how to order
it. This is of course extremely fun for us working with Traveas.
In the same
time, our quite aggressive approach towards major players in the Swedish travel
agency market has led to international vibes. Both agency networks (originated
from the Swedish branch) as well as other international players have shown interest of letting us provide their clients with our services. So last week the
Traveas team went for our first European tour, visiting both Paris and
the Business Travel Show in Düsseldorf. This is of course great fun, but primarily it is
a very important confirmation that our way of thinking when it comes to distributing
our services is the right one. We have created something that agencies in many
ways can benefit from.
So, with
all these exciting international opportunities the time has now come for
Traveas to open up our for the rest of the world. We do so by launching an
English version of Traveas.com where now anyone, anywhere in
the world, no matter of which phone operator you use, can search for a
flight and order a tracking service.
This also
means that Traveas – The blog from now on will be written in English.
So, welcome
all international users and readers, wherever you come from! Please do not
hesitate to contact us with any thought about our services, good or bad
doesn´t matter, we would like to know what you think. Cheers!
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