Colin Graham
CEO, Uxplr Inc.
What services does your company provide?
Uxplr, pronounced you-explore, is a software company that has developed a tool that provides recommendations of destinations in the world that fit their preferred travel criteria. A user can input simple information such as budget, origin airport, number of travelers and travel dates and receive personalized and ranked recommendations of destinations that meet their travel preferences. After the initial recommendations, the user can further filter the options using several criteria including weather, activities, restaurants and hotels and even what friends are associated with the recommended destinations. The system fills a gap between the traditional “to”, “from” online travel agencies and airlines aren’t addressing. We fill the “what if I don’t know where I want to go or I want to know what my options are” segments of the market reducing the time users spend researching vacations.
What is your educational background?
I attended undergraduate college at Delaware State University and started out as a Computer Science major before switching to Management Information Systems to get more business and technical knowledge. After graduating Delaware State University, I attended the George Washington University for graduate school with a major in Engineering Management.
What inspired this career path?
I love to travel and was doing a fair share of it when I realized I was experiencing the same patterns of frustration when thinking/researching where I should go next. I would go to an Online Travel Agency or airline and enter airport code after airport code (I had them all memorized at this point) attempting to see what my options were based on price, location, type of vacation, etc only to be frustrated at how long it took and how limited my options were. I want to see everything the world has to offer but I also want the best value for my money, I think most of our users feel the same way.
Who are your targeted clients?
Our ideal clients would be any online travel agency, travel provider (airlines, cruise line, rail, etc) travel content provider, travel blog or any service where there are users researching travel and the company wants to improve asset productivity, conversions, differentiate from competitors, and improve/create a new revenue stream.
Why should someone utilize your services?
The current process of identifying travel options and resources is too time consuming and is causing frustration along with a loss of sales. If you have seen any of the various travel commercials on television a huge segment of them focus on how time consuming the process it. Additionally I think we all want to know what our options are and get the best value, for instance if you have a $800 budget and want to travel somewhere, would you spend it going to California if you knew it could take you to Paris because of a fare sale, etc? Or not having local knowledge of a location to know when it is rainy season and you think you are going to a beach paradise? Or not knowing that you can travel for a smaller budget than you thought? Or finding those places in the world that cater to the activities that you love to participate in? You want a beach, museums and skiing in one location? Where in the world can you do that? Our goal is to help companies that currently provide travel services (Airlines, Blogs, Online Travel Agencies, tour providers,etc) to better cater to their users while helping them to increase their revenue.
What’s next?
We are continuing to expand our service across our customer base, get additional investment, and build out our additional technical capabilities; we have some really cool plans for our customers.
How can people find you?
Currently we have our “Beta” product live at destinationdecision.com. We love to hear feedback on the product so please check it out and let us know what you think. We can be reached at [email protected]
