Pack your bags: booking a group holiday just got easier

A Sydney startup is aiming to make it easier for travel companies to generate and manage group bookings.

Troopr is an online booking system that helps customers showcase their travel packages and accept individual payments by friends.

Richard Ing, co-founder and chief executive, told StartupSmart the idea for the startup came from a bad experience booking his own group holiday and thought there had to be an easier way.

“I had a personal experience of frustration gathering a large group of friends and getting them to commit to an idea and then handling the transaction,” he says. “It really hampered the mood.”

Ing says Troopr combines the power of social media with a traditional booking system, all in a clear and easy-to-use format.

“We’re in the business to make group bookings easy because we know the complexities of gathering people to an event and the complications associated with booking it in,” he says.

“What really powers us is that in a group of friends and families there are the people we’ve identified as key influences, and their goal is to book in a trip. Facilitating them really helps drive the booking forward and maximises the value of the booking.”

Troopr has processed more than $30,000 worth of bookings in the last three months, and one of the founders has moved to Seattle to explore the US market.

“What’s been really great for us is we’ve bootstrapped up to this point and have been fairly self-sufficient,” says Ing. “We are looking for funding at the moment and expanding our customer base. The customers we are appealing to are travel and experienced tour providers.”

The business is being developed at Fishburners, a popular co-working space for entrepreneurs. Ing says working alongside other startups has been invaluable in getting the booking system off the ground.

“We’ve used quite a lot of the learning in terms of the lean startup methodologies and experience from neighbouring startups to really help us validate our idea and bring the idea to market,” he says.

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