CNet Japan Startup Award nominees: Travel startups Asoview and Trippiece

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This is part four of our CNET Japan Startup Awards nominee rundown. The rest can be found here.

In the past few years, there has been a surge of travel startups in the US. Trippiece and Asoview are looking to disrupt the archaic and monopolized industry in Japan.

trippiece
Trippiece

Trippiece is the most similar service to Gogobot in Japan. Gogobot, as many of you know, is the most visited travel startup in the US, beating out AirBnB and Hipmunk in uniques so far in 2013.

Where Gogobot solely relies on social graphs for trip itineraries, Trippiece highlights all user-generated content and is planning to take it one step further than Gogobot by securing partnerships with major travel agencies [1].

Launched in March of 2011, the company has so far acquired more than 50,000 users. But the CEO admits they have a long way to go to meet milestones on their roadmap. They have a repeat user rate of 30% to 40%, and with over 60% of their overall users accessing their site through mobile, they are meeting the needs of Japanese travelers.

Japanese internet user behavior is rapidly shifting and consumers are now more mobile than ever before with analysts predicting that by 2014, 60.2% of users will switch to smartphones. That’s almost a 150% rate of change since 2011. Trippiece, whose users are mainly mobile, is ahead of the game.

Asoview resembles the early days of Zozi, an adventure experience site. Asoview has over 460 partnerships, securing its biggest one thus far in Yahoo Travel. They are looking to fill the niche of unconventional travel activities such as skydiving and ice climbing, or also more mellow experiences like swimming with dolphins. Regrettably, there is no available information on profitability or user base right now for Asoview that we can pass on, but we’ll update you if we learn more.

We wish both Trippiece and Asoview the best of luck at the Cnet Japan Startup Awards on Tuesday!

Asoview
Asoview

  1. Includes JTB and other unnamed agencies. See CNet Japan, e27 for more information.  ↩