A couple of experienced digital media entrepreneurs have teamed up to build a new social travel site catered to families called MiniTime.
The venture is backed by $1 million in seed funding from investors like former Yahoo (Interim) CEO Ross Levinsohn, who has also joined MiniTime’s board of directors.
The company is led by former 5to1 co-founder and Yahoo VP John Smelzer, and was founded by Nimrod Lev and Oleg Sandler, who previously founded kSolo and sold it to FOX Interactive Media / MySpace.
Indeed, that was back in the days when Levinsohn was President of FOX Interactive Media, and Smelzer a high-ranking executive.
Anyway.
Launching today, MiniTime is billed as the first family travel and leisure site with personalized recommendations for parents based on the ages of their kids.
The site aims to offer parents a combination of editorial curation, algorithmic recommendations, a community of peers and tools to help them plan, book and share family travel experiences.
The founding team claims neither ‘general interest travel sites’ nor sites that rely solely on a users’ social graph can adequately address the needs of parents.
Smelzer says:
“Family travel planning is hard, and we intend to make it easy. There’s a ton of family travel information out there, but it’s scattered and unrefined, forcing parents to spend hours combing through listings and reviews not relevant for their families.”
That’s the problem MiniTime aims to solve, and it has curated over 300 family-friendly destinations in North America and the Caribbean so far, and at launch features age ratings and information on kid-friendly amenities for over 1,000 hotels and activities.
The startup says it plans to continue curating and crowd-sourcing family travel destinations around the world.
MiniTime boasts that it will have multiple revenue streams, including lead generation (“click-based”), brand advertising (CPM), ecommerce (commissions on sales of travel products, and potentially, a subscription concierge service.
Smartphone and tablet applications are said to be in the works.
MiniTime was originally founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
Image credit: Thinkstock
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