[Travel Startups] How do you handle the Covid19 crisis?
Hey there,
During the past 2 years, I've been building stuff to make it easier for people to travel. But with the COVID19 crisis, behaviours have dramatically changed and most of my projects went from profitable to meh...
Two of my main competitors either pivoted or closed doors, and I'm thinking of changing paths too.
How do you handle this? Do you think it's time to shut down and completely change industries, or do you still have some sort of hope?
P.S.: my main project is about finding cheap flights, and as IATA found out, global passenger traffic will not return to pre-COVID-19 levels until 2024, a year later than previously projected.
I never built a community for my app www.hopupon.com which I also finished during COVID. I'm so far just paying the server fees and connecting with the community but I'm not making any money :(. What about you?
My team and I pivoted our travel startup late 2019, just before COVID-19 and launched just as COVID hit so we weren't profitable at that stage.
Since the product is targeted at Australians for tourist visas, and no one is allowed in or out of Australia, business is literally zero.
As to your question, we've left the visa bot on and answering any enquiries that come our way (most of them are long-term visa questions — not our business) and posting the odd blog post to keep relevant.
None of us are working on it, in any capacity, we are just biding our time until the pandemic is over.
We've thought about branching out into other legal areas, but the team is tied up with full time jobs that have increased demand since the pandemic has hit.
@corymayfield thanks for sharing your experience! I hope it is not too frustrating for you and the team. That's about the same for me, when demand decreases on my side project, it increases on another side, but I'm still scratching my head thinking of a way to make this pandemic viable business-wise.