Gloria Molins is the founder of Trip4real, a travel experience platform. The year and a half old startup has had a colourful start-recently raising €1 million funding, calling Ferran Adria as one of its investing “godfathers”, and raising funds through IndieGoGo to go to San Francisco to meet with Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter and Dropbox. In this interview, Gloria tells us what’s next in the Trip4Real journey.
Describe Trip4Real to someone who hasn’t used it before.
Trip4real is a community-driven platform that connects locals with travelers. Locals from all over Spain can become tour-guides in whatever they are passionate about and travelers get to have genuine experiences of the places they visit alongside them.
We’ve made it possible for people to discover what places are really like, through the eyes of locals.
What inspired you to start Trip4Real?
I’ve spent a lot of time traveling across the world and discovering new cultures, and at some point I realized that the highlights from each trip were always those that were shared with someone local. The times when someone took me away from the tourists. The times I really had a chance to enjoy where I was. Traveling wasn’t just about the places I visited, but the people I met and the things I shared with them.
So, when I came back to Spain, I decided that it was time to connect the dots. Time that locals and travelers had an easy way to meet and exchange cultures and share experiences.
Tell us some of the unique experiences offered on the platform.
Well, the range is immense. We have over 1000 activities in Barcelona alone, and we reach across the whole of Spain, so you can imagine the variety!
You can take sailing trips along the Costa-brava with hobby sailors, enjoy a balcony view of Pamplona’s Bull Runs with locals & their friends, jump on a vintage bike and gorge on tapas in Barcelona, let a professional chef show you around the best markets & explain the food culture, all the way to star-gazing while snacking on tapas in an observatory in Mallorca.
We also have some more outlandish ones, for example, you can join in on a traditional Castillers practice in Barcelona. You know the human towers we love to watch here? Something for the more adventurous. It doesn’t get more local than that!
Despite so many things to do, each activity is unique, personal and inspired by the individual local’s passions.
What makes Barcelona the right place to host your platform?
Barcelona is an inherently open city & its multicultural residents are very receptive to innovation, so it’s a great city to start-up in. On top of that, it’s now Europe’s third most visited city, after London and Paris. Last year the city hosted 7.4 million tourists, meanwhile only 1.4 million people live here. Being in the tourist capital of Spain puts us in the middle of the action. Helping us better understand and navigate the market.
What are some of the pain points in the hospitality industry that Trip4Real seeks to solve?
We can all relate to finding ourselves in a foreign city and desperately wanting to experience its culture, but not knowing where to start, what to do or where to go.
Well, our locals take the pain away: No more fighting with maps, feeling ripped off every-time you sit down for a drink or being surrounded by every other language except the native one. Instead you can just let the locals show you around. You’ll probably even make friends along the way.
What are some of the challenges in bringing Trip4Real to life?
Peer-to-peer business is growing and gradually the world is starting to hear about it, however, sometimes we have difficulty communicating that the activities our locals offer are unique and that they are just normal people happy to show them around. People just aren’t used to the concept yet! Trip4real is forging the path, people just don’t know that they can tour with locals. That’ll change soon.
Congratulations on your recent funding, what are your plans for this investment?
Internationalization! We’re already leading the market in Spain so we plan to open in 6 European cities by 2015. We are focusing on optimizing our existing channels, establishing the best possible team and growing to our greatest potential as quickly as possible.
Soon we’ll have made it possible for everyone in the world to have unique, memorable and authentic experiences with locals when they travel!
Trip4Real by the numbers:
