TrekkSoft, The SaaS For Tour & Activity Providers, Raises Further $800,000

Hot on the heels of Silicon Valley competitor Xola raising $1.8 million last week, Swiss startup TrekkSoft, which offers a SaaS for tour and activity providers, has raised $800,000 in follow-on funding, bringing the total raised to $1.6 million.

The new investment comes from the company’s original backers, including Redalpine Capital II, the Innovation Fund of Schwyzer Kantonalbank, and a group of private investors comprising Armin Meier (former CEO of Kuoni), Walter Güntensperger (CEO of Active Travel and former CEO of Hotelplan Switzerland), and Adrian Locher (founder and COO of DeinDeal.ch).

Rather than targeting consumers directly, TrekkSoft primarily offers a B2B solution to enable tour and other activity providers to promote, manage and sell their tours online, offline and on mobile. It’s designed to let them manage prices, capacity and sales channels from one platform — specifically supporting real-time, online bookings of live inventory both online and in-destination via mobile devices.

In addition, TrekkSoft includes an integrated payment gateway, tour management software, and a CMS with a suite of promotional tools including social media integration, and agent tracking.

For tour and activity providers, TrekkSoft is free at sign-up, with no fixed fees, or set-up costs. Instead it charges 6% plus a $.50 transaction fee on any online booking, which includes credit card and PSP fees. All offline reservations and bookings — i.e. those where payment isn’t processed via TrekkSoft — are free of charge, such as POS bookings, telephone reservations, direct payment on arrival etc.

In a statement, TrekkSoft co­-founder and CEO Jon Fauver talked up the challenge of offering a pure B2C marketplace for tours and activities, noting the fragmented nature of the market, “high inventory acquisition cost, and lack of live inventory online.”

Instead the company has chosen to go the B2B route with a SaaS that makes it easy for tour and activity providers to bring their inventory online, along with facilitating direct sales, and enabling them to connect to extended distribution partners via the TrekkSoft Channel Manager.

In this sense, TrekkSoft is able to act as a conduit between tour and activity providers and B2C offerings — either the tour and activity operator’s own sites or those of partners.

Since launch in 2010 TrekkSoft says it’s processed over 850,000 tour & activity bookings and grown its live inventory to more than 4,800 tours in 115 different countries. Companies using Trekksoft range from one person owner operators to large tour operators.

It’s also recently partnered with TripAdvisor to jointly collect reviews for both properties and help drive sales for tour and activity providers.

Along with Xola, competitors include Rezgo, TourCMS, and Bookeo.