Internet Marketing for Hospitality & Tourism

Prior to the on-going pandemic, the travel industry was a 9 trillion US dollar global economy.

At one end of the internet travel market, there are a number of highly successful portals that allow travellers to research individual places of interest for their trips (think of sites like TripAdvisor) - as well as taking a commission from sales.

At the other end comes literally thousands of individual unstructured travel blogs - making money through affiliate marketing. The most successful of these blogs pay a lot of attention to SEO and great content - to ensure that they return high in the Google Search results when travellers are researching a trip.

With MapADay.com, we set out to build an SEO optimised platform to allow users to find, create and share travel itineraries in a consistent format. We focus more on building an entire trip than individual places of interest (although of course we host those too). We allow users to create a profile, tell us where they are interested in travelling to, and then our algorithm can come up with a suggested itinerary - relieving the user of hours of internet research planning their trip. Businesses can add themselves on MapADay - can can then become part of a user generated itinerary (think accommodation, restaurants, places of interest).

Additionally, we allow businesses to create travel itineraries using our platform that will be found when travellers are researching their trips using Google Search. In this way, the platform enables marketing for the hospitality and tourism sector.

The product is live, but still in constant development. We have enabled the manual creation and publication of travel itineraries, and have worked with some highly skilled travel writers to seed the system. Our algorithm to build a trip using the meta data that we have collected is in development - although we have a live prototype screen that gives an insight into where it could head.

Who We Are Looking For

We are a 2 person self -funded team. We need a partner to round off our skill set in order to take MapADay far enough to evaluate its commercial potential. Our primary skills lie in technology, operations, finance and project management. Where we lack, we make up for in determination and enthusiasm.

We are looking to add a Co-Founder who can wear quite a few hats. Firstly, we need a partner who can work with us to identify an overall business direction. We have a few commercial models in mind, but ideally you have a lot more experience than us in evaluating different models that we can experiment with. 

Secondly, you'll be connecting with users from whom we can gain constant feedback in order to refine the user experience and define the product roadmap.

Thirdly, we have aggressive targets that we know we need to meet in terms of recurring monthly users. We need a partner who can help us capture sustainable organic traffic from Google search using appropriate techniques. Ideally, you'll have good experience within the field of marketing and specifically internet marketing and SEO.

You'll have demonstrable experience of either growing an online business and / or growing a business in the tourism, hospitality or travel sectors.

Above and beyond the above ideal attributes, energy, commitment and enthusiasm are key to any startup's success.

What We Can Offer

Research and development of the platform so far, along with working with a community to development content, has taken us around 2 years, on and off. While we have come quite far, it's not time to quit the day job any time soon :)

MapADay currently sits under our Peak Cadence ApS company. When we find the right co-founder to complement us, and we can agree on a roadmap, vision and plan, we’d like to create a new startup company for MapADay, and agree on equity stakes.