Layup
Travel planning tools for travel professionals
One of the consistent areas that travel agents seem to use less-than-ideal solutions is inquiry forms. Many just use google forms, or some WordPress plugin to capture leads for their new clients.
So, today Layup launched our free form builder. The goal is to be somewhat of a lead magnet of our own. Bringing new users to the site looking for a better way to build an inquiry form.
Realized that despite the pilot being live, I haven't shared much of the actual user experience on here, so I thought I'd add this in.
One of the pieces of Layup that makes it appealing to travel agents, is the traveler portal. When a traveler is working with an agent, they need a way to see their proposal, stay up to date with trip details, and view their itinerary.
So here's a demo trip portal!
After the pivot and new MVP, I took some time to redesign Layup's website. Tailored the content on the landing page to be more directed at travel professionals, created some additional marketing landing pages for specific demographics, and added a blog (https://layuptravel.com/blog) to attempt to drive a bit of organic traffic to Layup.
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Updates, industry info and more.
I hate "and more." Feels like you just don't know/have no focus yet.
Also which industry, not clear from this section only if I have more context on you
Could try something like
Travel industry deep dives and recent events
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Yeah, the existing language lacks any intention. Thanks for the suggestion!
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In January I opened up the initial version of the product.
The initial feature-set for Layup was essentially a proposal building tool.
It included...
- Light weight Trip and Traveler management
- Simple block-based Proposal builder
- Itinerary builder with rich data for points of interest, hotels, and flights
When looking at the MVP for Layup, the biggest thing I realized was that I was building features that weren't as single-solution-focused as I originally thought.
To make the product I really want to make, I needed to build out trip management tools, proposal builders, traveler management and itinerary management. These features on their own end up being a compelling product on their own, and have a much wider audience.
Instead of focusing on the corporate-specific tooling, I pivoted to create a trip management solution that would be appealing to any travel agent, tour operator, or corporate planner who needed a way to better plan their trips, build proposals, manage their traveler lists, and build an itinerary.
Originally, I wanted to work to solve a very specific problem with travel- corporate group travel. The process of booking hotels for group, whether you're an agency or just an employee planning travel is convoluted. It requires RFPs, proposals, contracts and more.
I started working to see what a better solution would look like, and started to try and validate what I ideas I had.
However, I ran into some walls that I couldn't quite overcome.
- In travel, single solution software is hard to sell.
- Identifying potential customers was much harder than I anticipated.
I still continued down this road for a while, building an MVP of the booking solution, but based on feedback, decided I needed to adjust the focus.
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