BUSINESS STRATEGY + TRAVEL MARKETING FOR MILLENNIALS
Poshpacker is an early stage travel and booking start-up. The curated online platform promotes the discovery and booking of affordable, design-driven accommodations.
Challenge: As an early stage start-up, Poshpacker experienced many challenges common in beginning stage of companies. With a lean team, they faced limited capacity, infrastructure, and resources. With an initial beta launch and limited expertise, the company also lacked customer metrics. Despite these challenges, Poshpacker needed ways to differentiate itself in a highly saturated travel market.
Process
The consulting team worked with the founders to analyze the startup’s business plan and identify challenges through extensive customer development. Through qualitative research, our team identified challenges such as: lack of product market fit, lack of brand resonance, and a limited financial model.
Recommendations
Through our findings, our team created a implementation roadmap to accompany recommendations. The key strategic recommendation was for Poshpacker to pivot from an online booking site to a trusted travel and lifestyle company that curates affordable, unique, and authentic experiences for millennial travelers. With time and investment, in five years Poshpacker can be a leading resource for millennial travel as measured by revenue, editorial and press coverage, social media following, and word-of-mouth referral.
Results
Founding entrepreneurs, Tania and Anna, spent several months in an incubator in Lisbon, and a few months in an accelerator in Chile implementing our recommendations. The team re-launched the travel site June 2015 with refreshed branding, an authentic and deeply integrated social strategy, a richer curation experience, and a growing team. The relaunch provided a better user experience with focused brand strategy and a roadmap to grow into a leading millennial travel research destination!
Team: Liz Comperchio, Dianne Que, Laurence MacSween, Adam Piron