Ravlling wants to be Northern Europe’s “conscious travel” booking platform

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Are you ready to revolutionize sustainable travel? At Ravlling, we help environmentally conscious travelers find and book eco-friendly trips in Northern Europe, ensuring a positive impact on both the environment and local communities. Our state-of-the-art technology powers an innovative travel search platform, offering the best sustainable options while supporting local charities. Join us in transforming the travel industry with our tech4good approach, creating value for both travelers and investors.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

The magic behind Ravlling lies in its smart software platform. It helps sift through tons of data from different sources using an advanced technology that’s easy to scale. We’ve adopted cutting-edge graph database and vector search technology as the cornerstone of our platform, combined with the latest technology in artificial intelligence. This unique structure helps Ravlling link personal preferences with matching (conscious travel) destinations, experiences and stays. This means travelers can enter search criteria in the absolute broadest way possible.

Unlike traditional keyword searches, our system understands the intent behind queries, allowing for more accurate and relevant results. By leveraging this technology and our extensive database, Ravlling provides travelers with fresh and surprising ideas for their next holiday destination. With every conscious travel booking, damaging overtourism is being diminished.

Ravlling stands out by keeping costs low compared with other outdated travel platforms dealing with legacy systems. Blending the latest scientific know-how with adaptable business models gives us a clear advantage.

For every booking, Ravlling donates to various partner charities across each destination featured on our website.

Give us your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of the company.

Our strength is the extreme scalability of our business concept and underlying technology. The operational effort and costs are fractional to the scaling of accommodating travelers in their search and expanding into other destinations and product groups, such as transportation, packages and multi-day tours. Ravlling has transformed personalisation for a mass audience, a prerequisite to making a significant positive impact.

The weakness of Ravlling is the market-wide, somewhat modest margin per traveler in a market where the cost-per-acquisition is skyrocketing. On the other hand, the travel industry represents billions and the conscious travel “part of the cake” is growing exponentially.

The real opportunity lies in harvesting the sustainability attempts and failures made by the major platforms in the past few years. Ravlling’s technology offers a much-longed-for solution, as our platform genuinely guides and inspires travelers to transform their travels into a force for good. Our approach focuses on honesty and transparency, ensuring travelers can make informed and impactful choices.

Our challenge lies in the evolving cultural narrative around conscious travel. This trend could potentially escalate to an extreme where cross-border travel is stigmatized, or more commonly, where the prevalent sense of ‘flight shame’ discourages air travel. Such shifts could undermine the significant positive impacts that travel can and should have on local communities, cultures and the spreading of tourism.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Travelers conscious of the impact of their holiday find it hard to search and find places that fit their needs. The industry tends to focus on the 1% of destinations that capture 99% of all tourists, while overlooking the negative impact on the local community and environment. We aim to spread tourism, support locals and communities, protect cultural heritage and stimulate biodiversity.

So you’ve got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

Just like traditional tourism, online search volumes are dominated by a long tail of queries with low to medium purchase intent. Ravlling’s platform is designed to capitalize on this pattern, driving traffic through organic search results in this long tail. This strategy not only fosters organic growth but also leverages affordable keywords to attract and convert travelers into purchase-ready customers. Our go-to-market approach is further enhanced by compelling storytelling on social media and blogs, bolstered by the influence of travel influencers.

Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

In the exploration and design of Ravlling, we have taken a human-centred approach to understanding the needs of the conscious aware target audience through interviewing, validating and testing designs and concepts. The first iteration of Ravlling went live in January 2023 allowing us to learn and pivot to the recently updated version.

Economically, we selected the tourist destinations in the platform based on the domestic and cross-border traffic flows representing a monetary annual value of €3.5 billion.

How and when will you make money?

As an affiliate marketing platform, we earn our income by the commission on consumed bookings on tours, experiences, activities and accommodations. Since the launch of Ravlling in 2023, we have been successful in growing our revenues with double-digit monthly growth.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

The founding team consists of a seasoned and complementary team of former travel, design and technology executives. Roy Scheerder (CEO) has been the chief commercial officer of Transavia Airlines and chief digital officer of the Royal Schiphol Group. Karmen Kekic (CPO) has led design and innovation projects for household brands, Heini Withagen (CTO) has built and exited a major internet agency and holds a PhD. Claire Dussenbroek (CMO) is a seasoned commercial director in the financial services industry and a social-impact entrepreneur.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Inclusive tourism is a cornerstone of our conscious travel philosophy. We meticulously curate experiences and accommodations based on their accessibility for disabled travelers. Recognizing that diversity and inclusivity in tourism are often overlooked, we are committed to making significant strides in addressing this gap and promoting inclusive travel for all.

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Balancing conscious travel, commerce and user experience presents natural challenges. We have worked diligently to find the optimal balance, integrating these dimensions into a holistic concept that aligns with the current market needs. Our ongoing efforts ensure that we meet travelers’ expectations while promoting sustainability and seamless user interactions.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact – so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

While aiming for a significant position in the European travel market space, we take a conservative stance in terms of managing our financial runway. We expect to get into a default-alive position by the end of the year. In parallel, we develop self-funded growth opportunities with solid evidence for business returns.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

A year from now, we envision our startup thriving, having scaled efficiently with our available resources. The conscious travel space will have evolved significantly, and Ravlling will be recognized by European travelers as the go-to solution for their previously unmet needs.

What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

Our endgame is to drive a significant shift in the travel market toward embracing conscious travel. While we are dedicated to making a substantial impact independently, we recognize that partnering with a strategic ally in the future could accelerate our growth and amplify our influence. Whether through acquisition or collaboration, we aim to achieve the scale and impact needed to transform the industry.