Travel is extremely enjoyable, more so if you are travelling with your closest buddies or relatives. But travelling as a group can also be extremely stressful; it all starts once you decide to travel together. The situation gets more complicated when you and your friends or relatives are in different locations.
While there are enormous “technical” ways to huddle and make decisions, making the bookings with the payments and getting input from everyone can be too much of a hassle. This is exactly what happened when Moe Esmaelli made plans to meet erstwhile colleagues in Miami, Florida for a reunion vacation after everyone have been scattered to different places around the world. Looking for a way to realize the plan, he came up with the idea of Combo Trip.
Kevin Robinson-Avila narrates how things unfolded for this enterprising graduate of the University of Mexico in this article ComboTrip Makes Group Travel Planning Easy posted in Albuquerque Journal – Business Section
“Travel planning is always hard, from the moment you start planning it, and if it’s a group of people, everyone has a different mindset and travel tastes,” Esmaeili said. “I started thinking, there should be a solution for a group like mine to handle everything, so I began building a platform for groups to create trips and share all the information to allow everyone to join in the decisions and the activity planning in real time from any place in the world.”
That vision has blossomed into ComboTrip LLC, which officially launched in April at the FatPipe ABQ business incubator in Downtown Albuquerque, where the company is based.
Travis Kellerman, Chief Marketing Officer of ComboTrip explains what make this platform can make group travel like a walk in the park.
- The power to work together: Primarily, it works by putting every component of the travel plan – booking hotels, flights and car rentals together. The platform also provides massive information about 98 percent of the cities, towns and other target destinations around the world.
- The power to Planit: This is the special feature of the software, which allows the travel joiners to plan their trip together. Each one can make the suggestions, discuss and decide, as well as make all the necessary reservations in real time. It lets you split costs and lets you see what each one needs to pay and who owes how much.
- The power to make comparisons: It also allows you to compare the prices with alternative arrangements and booking using other platforms without sweat. As a savvy traveller, you want the satisfaction of getting the best deals. This is why the “compare” feature is an important for most travellers.
- All these for free! That’s the icing to the cake. It is a free software. If you are wondering what’s in it for ComboTrip, it earns from commissions that the company charges when travellers make their bookings on travel sites. The company was also able to raise a substantial funding from Angel investors to keep them going.
What makes it different from other apps online? It is an empowering app that connects people and let them travel together with much ease and convenience. Other apps for group travel don’t have the centralized features, the info about local activities and the ability plan and book in one place. Esmaelli explains, “You have to get all the different data for your itinerary from different sites and enter it manually on your own. Ours does it all for you in one place and in real time.”
Taking off somewhere for fun with family or friends, there is no harm checking out Combo Trip platform, which is now available through its company website: www.combotrip.com
For your convenience, the company is now working to make this a “mobile app for Apple (iOS) devices in a few weeks and for Android devices over the summer.”
