Tripvisto wants more Indonesians take on tours

 
Indonesia’s travel space is heating up, especially in the tour and activities industry. Tripvisto, the newest player on the block, today announces that it has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures1. The team will use the money to hire more employees and to improve their products.

“Today’s travelers not only stay at good hotels when they’re traveling. The need to explore local experiences and try to do exciting activities is increased. We will address the needs and make it easy for people to access,” says co-founder and CEO Bernardus Sumartok. Currently you can only see the landing page for Tripvisto’s upcoming launch. He says that they plan to launch in a couple of weeks and make sure they can grab the year-end holiday momentum.

Sumartok himself is running another travel startup which offers tour and activity packages for tourists called Flamingo. He plans to shut it down and redirect the users to Tripvisto when the latter is launched.

Sumartok reassures readers that Tripvisto won’t share the same fate as its older brother as he has learned a lot about product development and domain expertise from his previous venture. “We make improvements on [Tripvisto] based on real insights from our previous experience with Flamingo,” says the CEO.

He hopes that Tripvisto can bring good impact to the local economy, one of which is by helping local people promote their holiday destination and services online. The online tour market represents a substantial opportunity, “There are more than 100 million travelers in ASEAN now and it’s our chance to solve their problem and make local experiences easier to access,” says the guy.

The team’s current focus lies in the Indonesian market, but they aren’t shy to disclose that they aim to target the Asia Pacific market in the long run. That’s also one of the reasons they’re using the .com domain name of Tripvisto compared to the local .co.id domain used for Flamingo.

Sumartok is joined by two other co-founders: Aditya Saputra and Fitri Andriani. The three co-founders identify Valadoo and BeMyGuest as their closest competitors in the region. The former recently merged with travel social network Burufly and launched a revamped website. According to Sumartok, the team simply plans to build a better customer experience from online to offline compared to competitors, as well as offering a wider and deeper set of packages at affordable price.

This has been an especially busy month for East Ventures. The VC firm has been involved in three other investments in Indonesian startups: wedding marketplace BrideStory, marketplace for private tutors and students RuangGuru, and ad tech company Adskom.

See: 10 of Indonesia’s most active venture capital firms

VIA 

1. Disclosure: East Ventures invests in Tech in Asia. Read our ethics page for more information.↩