16 1 月 Spice Travel Builds the One-Stop Online Travel Video Platform with Contents and Product

Leo Lee, the co-founder of Spice Travel, shared with us the company’s mission statement of presenting customers with impressing projects. Immersing in sparkles of inspiration has been each member’s routine life in Spice Travel. With over 540 thousands subscribers on the YouTube channel, Spice Travel guides the audience to explore unknown spots with refreshing perspectives. “However,” Leo explained, “we are more than a media platform because we not only introduce interesting places, but also make the dream of offbeat traveling come true.”

Use Video Contents to Build the Brand Focusing on Unique Traveling

Spice Travel cuts into the travel market with video contents, a more high-threshold approach compared to that with images. Spice Travel noticed that video creation had gained some attention since 2011; however, it did not grow into a trend. With keen market sense, founders knew that video creation would thrive in the near future since the target audience of travel industry was large and the opportunity of vertical integration was forward-looking. Spice Travel was thus founded in 2015 to use an innovative “video-based” solution to market themselves and meet clients’ needs. Shortly after, video communication has become a trending medium in various mainstream media and social media platforms.

Leo pointed out, “Video contents create and stimulate the market needs.” Unique Traveling experiences, the brand promise of Spice Travel, is the key to its success of attracting new audience and increasing fans. For one thing, staffs in Travel Spice contribute to its DNA of not “following suit” since their distinctive personalities and tastes shape a traveling attitude of experiencing the authenticity. For another thing, self-guided tour has become easier nowadays thanks to the development of budget airlines and the trend of customizing one’s own trip. Although people enjoy self-guiding themselves, their trip schedules look similar due to insufficient information. Since there were no travel agencies focusing on unique traveling such as recommending secret spots, Spice Travel seized the opportunity to turn the insight into a successful business.

Online Customer Service for Self-Guided Tours Solves Traveling Pain Points

Leo said, “Unique traveling experiences highlighting not following suit is not an original idea since many people are practicing it. However, Spice Travel is the one takes it to a real business level.” Spice Travel has conducted sophisticated researches in the preliminary phase to uncover special spots and different ways to explore them. A thorough search was carried out with the help of the internet: Spice Travel uses Google Maps to find spots and searches related keywords one by one to see whether those places are worth being reported. It also establishes a giant fan pool on the social media for interviewing local residents and travelers to probe into unique stories of the spots. Leo added, “It sounds easy, but in fact it’s tiring and someone must pick it up.” He continued, “When you do something and find out that it is valuable, it becomes your potential advantage. Then, you should try quantifying it and that is how innovation happens.”

The next step is to find the product-market fit that meets the demand of target audience. The product should cater to their preference, make them feel valuable, and solve their problems. Spice Travel is certain that the demand for such product exists from the feedback of numerous fans. However, it is difficult to realize what consumers want to a practical product. Though people go for cool places, there are lots of disturbances getting in their way to an enjoyable trip, including language barriers, transportation issues, information gaps, etc. Therefore, Spice Travel carves out its business niche different from that of traditional and online travel agencies. It provides an Online Self-Guided Customer Service to help arranging your own trip schedule and matching with local merchants. Then, Spice Travel will leverage various video contents for marketing segmentation.

“To be frankly speaking,” Leo said, “our business model is in progress when the scale and production is still half way from the destination.” Though differing from their original business model, the success of Spice Travel brings them a steady income with sponsored contents. This shows that the audiences enjoy videos so much that they could “painlessly” finish watching every sponsored video, which are curated with great dedication.

Leo further explained, “I don’t think sponsored videos are toxic or contradicted with our original contents. A good sponsored video is to introduce new things with your one-of-a-kind perspective and communicate with others in your own way.” As a media platform, Spice Travel’s ultimate goal is to make impact and amplify its advantage of vertical integration, introducing unique traveling experiences to cater to more fans that do not “follow suit.”

Leo Lee (Co-Founder & CMO, Spice Travel)

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