Everything travel is going mobile, and Finnish startup CreateTrips is picking up users and travel bloggers for their nicely-designed iOS-based smart trip planner. Users can build guides to share with friends, as well as browse a large library of mobile travel guides curated by travel-related businesses and over 300 professional travel bloggers.
The company raised an “early seed” of $600,000 in June 2014, and a late seed of $800,000 in January 2015, which they’ve now announced. The new round was led by Butterfly Ventures, with participation from S3, angel investors, and previous backer Frontier. Since launching in the summer of 2014 it’s gotten into the top 10 travel apps in more than 100 countries and has a “six digit” number of users. So far 25% of their userbase is in Southeast Asia, which has become a focus for the company.
“The word spreads fast, and over 300 of the world’s top bloggers are already sharing their travel tips with CreateTrips. We get more and more bloggers on board each day. We want to help bloggers find a new way to make money and to establish partnerships with companies. The best guides are already downloaded over a thousand times per month,” notes Juha-Petteri Kukkonen, the founder of CreateTrips. “Now that we have all the right players and we are getting ready to launch Android, reaching a million active users before the end of the year and truly becoming the world’s best travel app is less than a step away,” assures Kukkonen.
The app seems like it has something going for it. They’re helping travel bloggers find new revenue streams and its It’s a good place to share your adventures and trip plans with friends and fellow travelers. And of course, it brings much of their content and maps offline to avoid roaming costs, giving you something to do when traveling without WIFI. A good overview can be found in the video below:
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