I’ve been tracking Budapest-based Joobili since we covered them way back at Seedcamp Warsaw in March last year. Now the European travel content and trip planning site has won an undisclosed round of Angel funding led by organizers of the Sziget Festival, one of Europe’s largest outdoor music festivals, and online media executive Zoltan Kovacs.
Joobili’s original seed investor Esther Dyson also participated. It’s believed to be a six-figure Euro amount. Joobili CEO Jared Salter says the cash will be used to “launch a host of new features and boost engagement”.
Unlike most travel websites that use your travel destination as the site entry point, Joobili begins with your travel dates and suggests destinations specific to your dates and interests.
The site is currently focused exclusively on Europe, and tracks thousands of festivals and events you can build a holiday around, E.g. the Easter Markets in Prague, Snowbombing in Austria, or the Semana Santa in Spain. As a result it’s building partnerships with a number of tourism boards which want to promote related products.
The next stage is flight/hotel prices, weather and other factors like, will the place be crowded with other people.
Competitors would be TripAdvisor, IgoUgo, VirtualTourist, TripWolf, etc, however since Joobili is focused on the inspiration stage of travel they could in theory include these “competitors” as affiliate partners. Competitor event sites like Eventful, Zvents and Happenr are focused more on local nightlife – although who knows what their moves might be next.
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