Portland-based startup
TrovaTrip
has raised $5 million to grow its group travel planning platform.
PSL Ventures led the round, with participation from Elevate Capital and Oregon Venture Fund. Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz Worldwide and former COO of Uber, and Eric Breon, founder of Vacasa, also participated in the financing.
Founded in 2017, TrovaTrip enables influencers, topic experts and small businesses to host group trips. Once hosts are onboarded onto the TrovaTrip platform, they can pick itineraries offered by certified tour operators.
Through the platform, hosts can personalize their trip, select pricing, sell spots for the trip and manage bookings. An expert guide provided by the selected tour operator is also included.
“Travel has the power to bring the world closer together. After such a challenging year, we all are in need of community, culture and a well‐earned vacation,” says TrovaTrip co-founder and CEO Nick Poggi.
“With TrovaTrip, you can follow your passion around the globe - learn from your favorite photographer in Iceland, play disc golf in Cambodia with a professional athlete or hike with your hero in Patagonia. Our platform enables these experts - “hosts” - to easily plan, sell and host trips around the globe with their audiences. The additional funding will allow us to invest in our team, our customers and our platform as we continue to build more incredible experiences for travelers and more robust tools for Hosts."
In the early days of the pandemic, TrovaTrip’s bookings fell 75%, forcing TrovaTrip to reevaluate its strategy, Poggi says. Despite the headwinds the company faced, bookings nearly tripled in 2020.
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“The TrovaTrip team is clearly onto something incredible. This is a consumer‐based travel company that not only survived the pandemic but grew tremendously, offered new ways for creators to monetize and are now helping people safely return to travel,” says Ben Gilbert, co‐founder and managing director of PSL Ventures.
“We are excited to lead this investment in TrovaTrip, as the company sits at the intersection of the rapidly growing creator economy and the re‐emerging consumer travel industry.”
TrovaTrip says it is committed to inclusivity and making travel accessible to all and offers experiences in 40 countries. The platform has more than 200 hosts, and more than 350 trips are planned for the remainder of 2021 and 2022.