Travel startup Qiito, working quietly behind the scenes, now ready for Primetime

The travel and tourism industry is one of the world’s largest, so it’s inevitable that many startups want to be a part of it. In Singapore, many travel startups have gotten quite a bit of attention too.

But not for one particular company, which had been quietly working the ground for the past few months. Now, however, it seems poised for Primetime.

The Singapore-based startup is ranked 63rd in the country on Alexa – closely behind Agoda and ahead of eBay and Tripadvisor. Its global Alexa ranking of around 20,000 places it in the region of Hipmunk, a highly-touted Silicon Valley travel site.

In additon, it has a partnership with the Taiwan tourism board, secured a seed funding of S$2.2M (US$1.75M) from Lunar Asia Investment, and hired a 15-strong team.

I’m talking about Qiito (pronounced key-tow). What started as a simple product review for me soon grew into an in-depth interview. For those curious about the company, here are some insights from the company’s  founder and CEO, Pei-Han Chuang.

Since the alpha launch in 2011, what was the thinking behind the various iterations of Qiito?

The current beta is our third major iteration. Feeling that a critical essence was missing, we had a series of intensive discussions and re-looked user behaviors. We realized that travel is about discovering your inspiration, getting motivated to travel and finally, planning for it.

Overall, we have categorized both travel companies into three broad groups:

1. Information-focused:  Users usually read through long texts, copy and paste the information to a spread sheet, and then they search for more information on Google.

2. Planning-focused: The planning focused model does not inspire users to use the websites beyond planning for their trips. That means travelers use the website for a limited number of times per year since there is only a limited number of trips one can make per year.

3. Social-sharing focused: As preference is a subjective thing, we believe this can only be used as a complementary tool to act as an endorsement for the trip that users are planning. It enhances users’ confidence on their decision.

The main challenge is to encourage users to visit the website even when they have no travel plans. This was one of epic discussions among Qiitors and we found that the answer lies on what is ‘Interesting’ and how to ‘grow interest’ in users. We are glad that we have a solution to this which has guided our site design. Unlike our competitors, our current beta version brings user through the discovery, research and sharing phases, which we believe, provides a cohesive co-creation environment.

Is your team concerned with the rise in social discovery travel applications such as TripL?

We’ve grown stronger in analyzing our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, their hits and misses. Majority of the startups fail to look beyond their team and their own idea. Our team, however, is not afraid to scrap our concepts and go back to the drawing board again.