Entrepreneurs provide ray of hope for travel industry
KUALA LUMPUR: One of the hardest hit industries during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the travel industry, affecting flights, hotels and tourism a ractions. The real question is, ‘How will the industry rebound and recover?’.
Malaysian tech-start-up Lynus Travel Sdn Bhd (Lynust) believes that the rebound and recovery will only see a significant boost when online travel services understand the changing dynamic in the way potential tourists will behave when researching and booking their holidays online.
Speaking about the new norm in online travel research and booking, Lynus Travel Sdn Bhd’s chief executive officer and founder, Raziq Rosman said, “Holiday travel researching and booking is moving away from the traditional corporatised format websites and platforms and becoming a true ‘Social Community’ where reviews and recommendations follow the style of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twi er and most influentially in this space, YouTube.
“To be honest, this move from corporate based and monetised online travel platforms started before Covid-19.
“However, the pandemic has served as an amplifier and made the move towards ‘Social Travel Community’ accelerate faster than expected.”
Raziq, who is an avid traveler himself, has a rich heritage in the travel industry with his father owning and operating a travel company before his passing in 2016. “The evolution of the travel industry is something my father and I o en spoke about and to bring our conversations to fruition and make them a reality has been my passion and driving force”.
In Phase #1, Lynust concentrated its efforts in developing a social media look and feel platform. Phase #2 saw the company developing the initial co-created and curated content for which they already have 15 stories, videos and posts from travelers. Phase #3 involved securing the server capacity to deal with the large volume of traffic.
Today, Lynust is entering Phase #4. Even though we only so launched the contentbased site in early June 2020, we already have a database of 57,235 potential tourists globally.
The task now is to get them to share and post their previous holiday experiences on the site so that holiday makers can make their own informed decisions on travel destinations based on impartial experience sharing and most importantly, videos.
This unbiased and unedited sharing of these special holiday moments will really ignite would-be holiday makers to explore their wanderlust.
“It has been tough. Potential investors and the Agencies set-up to help fund tech and entrepreneur start-ups are skeptical of trends before they take-off and usually only buy-in and invest at the point where the trend starts, so I have had to fund the development personally so far.
“Now however that the trend is incubating and starting to become a tangible reality, we will see investors and startup/entrepreneur funding Agencies providing support at entry level.”
Raziq went on to explain that his initial target is to really heavily promote intraMalaysia travel because that will help the overall national economy recover faster, generating GDP and hopefully helping hotels and homestays reopen which would in turn get people back to work and help the unemployment rate decrease.
“We are already developing content for Sarawak and Sabah based tourism a ractions and will start on Peninsular Malaysia based a ractions as soon as we can,” he continued.
“With investment or support from the Government, Ministry of Tourism or startup/ entrepreneur funding Agencies, we could expand the team and develop the content faster.”