TripZilla featured on Web In Travel (WIT)

June 25, 2012 - PRLog -- As featured on webintravel.com on 7 June 2012

June 7, 2012 - Having built its inbound portal, ComeSingapore.com, into a “fairly respectable” size with 300,000 unique visits a month, Travelogy.com is now out to create a one-stop outbound travel site in Singapore and eventually, Malaysia and the Philippines.

It has since rebranded its tourpackages.com.sg site, which was launched in November 2010, to TripZilla. The rebranding took place last October right after Winnie Tan, co-founder of Travelogy.com, pitched the model at the WIT Start-Up Pitch at the WIT Bootcamp 2011.

“We wanted a name that would cover more than packages. We want TripZilla to be the first stop Singaporeans and residents come to when they want to travel overseas,” said Tan.

The business first started as an aggregation of tour packages offered by traditional travel agents. The founders of the business saw an opportunity to help traditional travel agents go online in markets and reach new customers they weren’t reaching with traditional marketing channels.

Now it sees a bigger opportunity to also cover flights, hotels and travel deals. “Our portal is localized to each market. We offer links to OTAs, group tours, packages offered during events such as local travel fairs and group buying deals,” said Tan.

Travel fairs such as Travel Carnival and Travel Malaysia, held in Singapore, pay TripZilla a fee to feature their events on the site.

Offering a search and media model, it makes revenues from affiliate links and advertising and referrals.

“The idea is similar to a job portal or a car portal,” said Tan. “In those industries, advertising has already moved online but it’s been slower in travel.”

Technically, it’s not been hard to execute, she said, a matter of pulling APIs and screen scraping. The challenge has been dealing with traditional tour operators, some of whom do not even have a soft copy of their brochures. “So there’s a fair bit of data entry that has to be done.”

Travel agents have their own log in so they can input their own content. The site has received good response from medium sized tour operators who do not have the scale of say, a Chan Brothers, one of the big names in outbound travel, and “this enables them to be found more easily,” said Tan.

Much effort has done into educating of travel agents. “Their mindset hasn’t caught up with the fact that consumers are moving to digital and social media and mobile and that their marketing dollars should shift to online channels as well. A lot of them still advertise in newspapers and outdoor media.”

Tan is pleased with how TripZilla is performing. It has achieved a Google PageRank of 6. "This is fast for a site that's been around less than a year. Traffic is growing."

Bootstrapped from launch, the company is now seeking the first round of funding. Whatever funds it gets will go towards improving of the user experience, said Tan.

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Web In Travel (WIT) provides news, commentary, analysis and opinions on travel distribution, marketing and technology. It organizes the annual WIT (Web In Travel) Conference that takes place in Singapore.

TripZilla.com is Singapore’s most comprehensive travel portal. It helps users with their holiday research and travel planning, and basically, offers them the simplest way to find and book their travels. In addition to travel packages and detailed itineraries, users can also find full coverage of all major travel fairs on the site. TripZilla.com also aggregates all travel deals and promotions in Singapore and helps users find the cheapest hotels and flights available.

For more information, please visit:
http://sg.tripzilla.com/
http://www.Travelogy.com

TripZilla.com is curated by Travelogy.com Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based company that builds travel technology and provides digital marketing solutions for better travel experience.