Trip.com

Background

 

Trip.com was founded by Travis Katz in order to simplify the travel experience. The founder and CEO Travis did himself experience the need for a platform where travellers could find and book the best restaurants, ways of travel and activity options for each individual. Clearly, an application where the traveller, or individual, could focus his or her time on the experience rather than in front of the web searching for options. Currently, Trip.com is an application used globally by both individuals and travellers since it is an very useful and efficient tool in terms of suggesting the best options for each individual. The answer to this is that the application really tries to get know the person by filters, data and constant development. The idea is that the businessman and the backpacker, as an example, might not have the same budget nor taste and should therefore not get the same recommendations. Furthermore, a person living in New York on full time should not get the same recommendations as someone visiting the city over the weekend.

Innovation

Input

In terms of innovation, Trip.com believes that data and feedback feeds innovation. Indeed, that all updates and changes has to be supported by data i.e. the users of the application. Furthermore, that the change has to make sense, solve a problem and bring customer value. The founder of Trip.com believes in speed rather than perfection and means that all mistakes can easily be fixed for the better. Furthermore, in order to work fast and be efficient, hire the right people and trust them is key. Indeed, that the employees understand the whole picture and what has to be done.

When it comes to project processes, Trip.com uses OKRs to measure team performance. When developing new features the following questions are asked: how will this increase user count? How will this grow revenue?

Trip.com places a lot of emphasis on culture. Travis Katz specifically mentioned their ‘flat culture’ as a major competitive advantage.  With larger corporations providing market and hiring competition, Trip.com focuses on having teams work on specific problems that they believe in.

 

Process

In order to measure a project, Travis Katz mentioned that success and successful innovations come in “know how to measure it to know how it works”. Meaning, if you are able to measure a project through a product or service, is much easier to measure success, and not at least create a successful product or service. Therefore, “measurement is key!”. Trip.com works with a certain predetermined measurements of success for each project.

 

Output

Trip.com measures success of their projects based on:

• Feedback from users – by creating a social network for travels
• Number of users signed up
• Revenue/Profitability
• Growth
• A/B Testing

When deciding on when to exit a project if successful vs failed, Travis mentions that an important thing for every company, small or big, is to hire good people that will be able to make those decisions of exit or not by themselves. This is important for maintaining speed to market and always stay competitive on today’s market.