Fora's founder explains why competing with Booking.com on paid search is unsustainable for travel startups. Instead, the company recruits travel advisors and gives them tools to build SEO-friendly guides on fortravel.com, letting advisors generate their own demand and bookings without massive marketing spend.
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So going to the demand side, so, you know, how are you acquiring demand in such a, I would say, like, you know, large market, but also one that's very competitive?
Yeah, so this is the thing that I wanted to make sure that I said to this audience, which is if we were also doing all this shit and acquiring demand, we would be like DOA. So in travel in particular, acquiring demand is a highly, highly competitive game, which is why I go back to my initial point, which is know your sales and marketing strategy, know your distribution strategy, and make sure it's not It's just going to get better over time. So we found at One Fine Stay, we were competing— and this happens in travel, and I think a few of you are travel, kind of travel or travel-ish founders. We were competing against the channel. Like, we were basically like trying to get distribution through Expedia and Booking.com. And I could talk about that like all day long and why that was not a good solution to our problem. And then we were competing against them for the same keywords, right? And Booking.com in travel is one of the most sophisticated sort of Google marketers or like paid search marketers like in the world. And so like we would have to be almost as good as them and their team of like marketers and data scientists and algorithmic traders or whatever the hell that they have doing all their AdWords buying In order to actually have a shot at acquiring hotel in Rome or hotel in London type keyword demand. By the way, one anecdote about that. So I was at Skift Global Travel Forum like last month, and Glenn Fogel was being interviewed, the CEO of Booking.com. And like the Skift journalist, I don't know if any of you guys were at Skift, but the Skift journalist was like, So like, you know, Airbnb spends 20% of their revenue on marketing and you guys spend 50%. Like, how does that make you feel? Was kind of the gist of the question. And Glenn Fogel was like, we had $7 billion of EBITDA last year. Like, I feel fine, you know. So this is the level of competition that you're dealing with when you're trying to compete with travel dollars, when you're trying to acquire travel demand. And so we didn't want to do that again. So our business, and like the sort of the clever part I think about this business, is that we're really enabling the entrepreneur next door to sell to their existing book and to build a book themselves. So we are acquiring for sure on paid social advisors, agents. We're not acquiring the demand for those agents. Having to acquire both sides of a marketplace, if you want to think of this like a marketplace, is enormously capital consumptive. In this existing capital markets environment, I can't even imagine because it's hard enough to do one side of the marketplace in this, in this kind of venture capital environment. So we're not acquiring demand, we're acquiring supply or advisors, and we're enabling them and empowering them to build their own books of business and to generate their own demands. Now, it just so happens in our business travel and this industry, there is a lot of power in SEO. So the other thing that we wanted to focus on from the very beginning was back to empowerment, but empowering advisors to create content to show rather than tell that they know what they're talking about. And so if you go to our website now, fortravel.com, you'll see over 500 guides or itineraries Authored for free, like we didn't pay for it. It's UGC, so to speak. I mean, we did an SEO, like a light SEO edit, but we didn't write it. So that advisors can show rather than tell that they know a destination. And that's often a hook in all the calls to action, go back to them. But of course, that content, if it's good and if we do our job well, will also have SEO value. So it's not, you know, sorry advisor, we can't help at all. It's create some content. We do see every day a booking happening, probably every day a booking happening from content that is created by an advisor on the site. There's more than enough anecdotes to show that that side of it works. So we are giving advisors tools to build their own business, and we have the know-how. They would never have the know-how necessarily to build their own SEO-enabled, you know, travel website, but we could sort of centralize that for them.
