Farzana FattahIn start-up years, TripZilla is still an infant. Founded in 2010 by husband and wife team Winnie Tan and Eric Koh, the online portal claims to be South-east Asia’s foremost travel listings site – cornering almost 80% of the Singaporean market alone. I caught up with Winnie to find out how TripZilla is doing, since it made its debut at the WIT Bootcamp in 2010, and her thoughts on being a female entrepreneur.
Q: How is TripZilla performing?
Traffic to TripZilla.sg is currently higher than our next three competitors combined. In H1 2015, our media sales grew by 50% year-on-year. We now have more than 20 airlines and national tourism organisations on board TripZilla but we’re always looking to grow.
Q: How has your business evolved?
When we started out, we knew that retail travel agencies weren’t able to reach the customers, so we looked at the market and asked, “What tools can we build to organise the market?”
We were the first movers – although this wasn’t a good thing because no one understood what we were doing. We had to do a lot of convincing for quite a while… actually for the first two years.
At the start, TripZilla was focused on travel listings alone. There used to be a content section on TripZilla but this has grown into a new product – TripZilla Magazine – that now attracts over 1 million visits monthly.
If we had focused on listings alone, we would not have had the kind of organic growth that we have now. We spend almost nothing on marketing; what we do is to provide content that is very specific to Asian travellers and to cater to their interests.
Looking ahead, we are testing out a low cost carrier search function that directs traffic to airline sites.
Read the full article at WIT.
