As major online booking sites deploy millions of venture dollars in a fight for leadership, a startup founded just three months ago is bringing a fresh concept to the Russian online travel market.
iknow.travel collects, supports and encourages primary social networking among travelers. Users can discover interesting destinations based on the actual traveling experiences and recommendations of friends or experts. They can create their own trip plans by checking booking rates in one click, and post destination reviews as well.
“While Pinterest users share pictures as a common vision of the world, ours tend to socialize based on shared traveling ideas and experience,” iknow.travel founder and CEO Roman Medvedev said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “We are the first on the Russian language online travel market to use a visual web approach to display places all around the world – the easiest way to discover and share information. The travel planning niche is not occupied yet, and we are addressing it with a strong solution.”
iknow.travel is partially inspired by the US startup Gogobot.com: “We have similar business models,” said Medvedev, “and we’re keeping a close eye on their traction. But our interface and content do differ significantly, as does the way users provide their inputs. Russian and US travelers are similar in key behavioral patterns, but we have a lot of local specifics, which we could not ignore by simply cloning a model.”
iknow.travel generates leads for bookings on a per-click basis (CPC). The startup also expects to develop CPM based revenues.
“The average Russian traveler takes up to 40 days to plan a trip,” Medvedev noted. “Capturing user attention in this extended planning window offers unprecedented monetization opportunities.”
The project started almost a year ago, with a pilot version launched in December 2011 and the official site release following in June. Medvedev claims iknow.travel attracted more than 15,000 users in September and expects to reach the 20,000 mark soon “due in large part to strong viral features.”
In late 2011, iknow.travel received $400,000 in seed funding from a Russian business angel. The company has since approached investors for a new round of financing.
