From the moment I saw it, I was instantly enamored with TRVL. The brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Jochem Wijnands, TRVL is a sort of mashup that turns each user into a travel agent with the potential to earn money for their recommendations. Think of it as TripAdvisor meets Airbnb and Skyscanner.
Travelers, Wijnands says, are the best source of information for other travelers. And while the typical tourist spends hours scouring the web for information, TRVL puts all this information at your fingertips by leaving the guesswork to agents. These agents are locals (or highly familiar with a given area) and provide recommendations from the typical tourist sights, to the off-the-beaten path adventures you’d never find without the help of a local.
And since anyone can be an agent, your friend from Amsterdam can all of a sudden earn a commission for providing their recommendations. It’s personal, efficient, and as I said after speaking with the team over the last two years in Amsterdam: the future of travel.
As CEO and Founder Jochem Wijnands says:
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TRVL is tapping into the unmatched passion and knowledge of millions of travelers worldwide. Add to that an earning model, and you can see how TRVL is going to change the way we book our trips in the future.
The system is brilliant not only in its simplicity — fewer options lead to better results — but in providing value to both the traveler and the agent. Agents can earn a commission of up to 10-percent on everything from airfare, to hotels, car rentals, and even entertainment.
Better still, the recommendations don’t go anywhere. You can provide the same itinerary to hundreds, or thousands of people — or personalize it for each of them. For a company like TNW that throws one of the biggest parties in Europe each year at the TNW Conference, the potential to create tiered travel options (budget, mid-tier, and luxury) with hotel, flight, dining, car rental, and entertainment options for 11,000 conference attendees each year has the potential to be a game-changer.
But it’s equally as impressive on a smaller scale — or even for earning commissions by booking your own trips.
After launching TRVL late last year, the company is only picking up steam. It now has over 6,000 agents and just secured $2.7 million in seed funding to further its mission of dominating the world of peer-to-peer travel.
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