#identity card:
Holidoit is a Milan-based start-up founded by Marcello Pelucchi and Luca Silva, both 27-year-olds from Brianza, Italy. Thanks to an online portal, Holidoit makes it possible to book holiday experiences, from horseback riding to extreme sports, connecting customer demand with the supply of local partners who have long been offering these services in the area. We had a chat with Luca Silva:
#Flashback: How did your company come into being and what challenges await you in the near future?
We started during the Covid period and the idea came to us thinking about the isolation of those months and the consequences it could have had on the travel sector. Myself and the other founder of Holidoit, Marcello Pelucchi, for the first 9 months we moved independently, divided between setting up the technology for the platform and involving local partners. Since 2021, bookings have grown very fast, so we have been able to expand by hiring interns and collaborators; in 2022, requests on our site have increased tenfold, and we have reached 5 people hired full time, including IT engineers and content creation and partner relations staff. Now the challenge is inflation: consumers’ spending power has decreased by 20 per cent, many of them are less willing to spend in our industry.
#character: What sets Holidoit apart from others in the industry?
Ours is a project that was created for local customers, bucking the general trend in the travel sector, which until now has focused heavily on the foreign visitor who generally spends only a few days in a city of art he or she does not know. We, on the other hand, aim to get the customer out of the city, we address a different audience that has been neglected by recent innovations in the sector. For us it remains fundamental to maintain our local character, so at least for the next two years we will choose to stay in Italy, become more and more capillary and above all develop a loyal clientele, a novelty if you think that AirBnb, Booking, TripAdvisor, etc. focus precisely on one-off transactions, that is, on the client not interested in maintaining relations with the structure. For us, on the other hand, the goal is that those who try horseback riding, a day’s sailing, or our other products, then come back to try them again or recommend them to friends.
#AI: How can new technologies and artificial intelligence help your startup?
Targeting a different customer base makes it necessary to work on the site and its layout differently. Google is the biggest player in the world of travel and has only recently invested in holiday experiences, thinking of them as an afterthought, the last thing the customer books. We, on the other hand, want it to be the opposite: the experience must become the reason for the trip, so the customer is also more flexible, because he or she can choose between different opportunities at a medium distance from home. On Holidoit the customer looks at the various proposals and chooses the one that suits him best, while those who use Booking, Airbnb and other services already know where and when to visit before entering the site. The discovery factor is also very important to us, so photos, videos and visitor interaction will have to be increasingly present on our online portal. We will certainly make the site suitable for developing a social network, for example by adding the possibility for the customer to invite friends to an experience, or to share photos and videos of an activity they have just done. Taking into account all the particularities that make our service distinguishable, artificial intelligence could greatly improve the portal. First of all, it gives us the possibility of making our search bar more similar to that of Google thanks to semantic search, then we will focus on an assistance chat that knows how to advise on the best route to the place where the activity is carried out and in general answer the most disparate questions of customers thanks to AI software. This technology will also be very useful in profiling users more effectively: from a few simple words typed into the search bar, it will be possible to understand what that customer is looking for and to configure the offers on our portal to faithfully reflect their preferences.
