Travel Lounge - Nigerian Travellers Community [TravelLounge.ng]

Products
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TravelLounge.ng is a platform that allows Nigerian travellers to connect and share travel experiences.

Problem Statement
A rapidly increasing population, economic hardship coupled with community unrest has caused an increase in the number of Nigerians willing to travel out of the country. The fact that people see travelling outside of the country as their best bet for a better future has raised the spectrum of business opportunities within the travel industry.

Need of the Hour:
To capitalize on this opportunity, Travel Lounge comes with the idea of providing a user driven online community platform that brings Nigerians within and in Diaspora to connect and share experiences. Our platform enables prospective and experienced travelers to share unique travel moments with each other. Whether travelling for studies, work, tourism, medical or a complete migration out of the country, Travel Lounge hopes to provide an information repository to help make an informed decision before leaving the country.

How are we filling the Gap?
The current gap in the market is the inability for travellers to get reliable information and service with regards to traveling outside of the country. Hence, making wrong decisions on which country to choose for study, business or migrating to.

Travel Lounge hopes to provide a highly moderated platform designed for trust. Although we provide a platform for open conversation, only verified users can connect privately on our platform. For this to happen, our team will perform thorough due diligence on all members (including travel agents) before a closed connection is made. This is to ensure travellers meet with people of high integrity and reliability.

Along with this, we aim to provide guidance on general travel requirements for Nigerians as a whole. Using our country specific visa requirement tool, members can browse through the visa requirements for a specific purpose and country of their choice within a snapshot. This will help newbie travellers become familiar with travel terminologies (Visa, Immigration, Study Permit, Work Permit, etc.) and engage in purposeful conversation on the platform.

Lastly, we hope to provide Travel Agents and experienced travellers living in Diaspora to make a revenue through our marketplace. Our members can provide a unique service at a reduced rate compare to the market price. For example, a Nigerian in Diaspora can provide temporary accommodation for a newbie visiting a country for two weeks at a reduced rate when compared with using a hotel etc.

Ultimately, Travel Lounge wants to unite Nigerians living in Diaspora together!

Travel Lounge Business:
Three business models exist for phase 1 – 3 of product development:

I) Featured Listing on the Marketplace
II) Business Specific Advert Placements i.e. Travel Agency Advert placements
III) Paid membership

• Featured listing on Marketplace items:
Based on the acceptance rate of our product, we will roll out a weekly featured listing module (it has been developed) to attract a fee to list items at the top of our marketplace section. The featured listing item will also appear on every country-specific page for that marketplace item. For instance, if a user is browsing Visa and Immigration requirements sections for the United States, all featured marketplace items for the United States will be displayed in the side bar for that user. This also applies to our Experience, Q&A or Traveller sections.

• Business Specific Advert Placements:
Adverts on site will be focused on Travel and will be primarily driven by a user’s country of residence, membership type and age. For instance, advertisers on our site will have the option to target a user group. They can select when to display adverts based on where a user is located, a range of age groups a user belongs to as well as the membership type i.e. Newbie or Experienced Traveller. (A click and impression module is currently being developed for this purpose)

• Paid membership:
Premium features (Free visa application assessment & recommendation to consulates, closed travellers connection, free travellers companionship, free accommodation for newbie travellers, unlimited travel agent featured listings on the Marketplace amongst others will be introduced. Only paid verified users will be able to access these features.

Phase 4 and 5 business models are only available upon request by a specific audience.

Please visit TravelLounge.ng - Nigerian Travellers Community for more information. I would appreciate sincere reviews and comments.

Let’s do this together!

  • Manifest
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I wrote an article about the inspiration behind Travel Lounge - Miami and The Beaches - My Travel Experience in Miami, Florida (Day 1)

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I’m sure you’ve got a good thing going with your site but here’s some friendly advice regarding your submission.

If you want to sustain interest, keep the intro short and easily scannable. Think about an onion. You can reveal information in layers as people ask for more. You don’t need to shoot all your proverbial load at once.

3 Likes
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So I’ve gone to the site and here are my first impressions.

  1. Intro graphics and layout are decent enough. 3/5. You may want to A/B test a vector background to maintain consistency with the rest of the platform.
  2. Intro text isn’t very helpful to someone that stumbles on your site. That’s very subjective so you may want to A/B test some other copy.
  3. It may be nice to place an input control above the fold. An example could be “Where would you like to travel to?”. The action behind it will set the country context in the main dashboard.
  4. The dashboard is well laid out but the URLs may need to be more SEO-friendly or at least human friendly.
  5. Once I’ve set my context to say “United States”, the top links to “Visa requirements”, “Travellers” etc should keep me within the country context. Right now, it resets my country so I have to keep telling your platform which country I’m interested in.

There are a few other issues but let me yield for others to contribute.

On a positive note, it is a good initiative. I would use and recommend it. Well done. :slight_smile:

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Nice one you have going on there.
Here’s what I found out when I visited on a mobile device, you have a floating header and navigation box, but, the bg is transparent, so “Travellounge” mixes/interfers with the other text on the website alongside the navigation box.

And, this, is not cool.

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The website is sound, OP should rather invest time into getting travelers to contribute.

Invite travel/foreign college consultants as early contributors. It will be easier with travel brands once you have engagement.

Your audience - travellers - should be tech savvy and no less than middle class belt-holders, hence you shouldn’t hesitate to build an App, not for contributing on the site but for something more imminent to travel, maybe cataloging one’s trip, only after can you top it up with on-site contribution.

Or perhaps a currency conversion/update app for travelers, anything that will serve as an addon from travelLounge, easier to engage and more frequently engaged with on behalf of your primary services.

Look away from the site now it’s A-Okay, start hunting users! Godspeed.

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@manifest - Do you have an API to enable 3rd parties apps post data to your site?

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You are right!

There was actually a rationale behind the full product description. I could have introduced the product in brief without going an extra mile but I wanted a general review of the initiative. The online platform is just one of many streams to achieve Travel Lounge Vision and Mission. Again,I certainly wouldn’t describe this on any random non-tech savvy internet forums.

Regardless, thanks for the advice. I’ll use it when applicable.

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Thanks for the detailed feedback.

  1. The intro graphic caught my attention. I bought about 4 stock photographs of her just incase I need to use her to market the product.

  2. Definitely, a lot of A/B testing will take place over the summer. These stuffs could be very overwhelming. We already have a position for data scientist intern .

  3. I will look into this, A/B testing will definitely help.

  4. Long thoughts were put into the design of the urls. I wanted to ease navigation as well as content management. Initially, I wanted it to be based on country/purpose/…but I changed my mind.The URL’s are actually SEO friendly. I have not made the final decision but I would guess, users should browse the site regardless of the URL structure. The most important url is TravelLounge.ng :slight_smile:

  5. I’ll look into this.

Thanks for the positive note. Appreciate!

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Thanks. Please, on which mobile device? I thought I fixed this…Here is Youtube video.

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You are absolutely right! It’s a typical chicken/egg problem - we are fully aware of what we brought ourselves into. We also have plans to roll out some engineering applications as a marketing strategy. For now, we may have to do things that do no scale as long as it meets our long term vision and mission.

Godspeed - most importantly, in the right direction!:slight_smile:

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I visited it usind a BB10 Device.

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This is interesting…I am an avid traveler and I recently started blogging about my experiences this year zeegoes.com.
Any who, this falls in line with many Nigerians that find it difficult to be friendly outside their cultural space e.g. the folks that spend 10 years in foreign countries but only have Nigerian friends in that country. Traveling solo for them would be a bit difficult, thus the need for a platform like this.
On the hand, no offense to my fellow naija peeps, some Nigerians have very terrible travel etiquette. What happens if a booking is made on behalf of a group travel and someone decides to pull out after refund period is past? Is there a middle party that handles booking and processes where everyone contributes an equal share that can be viewed on a trip payment page for the group of travelers?
I signed up to check out more on your platform and you should fix the log out issue when a user clicks on another user’s name. On click, it re-routes to login page.
Good luck with your hustle!

1 Like
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@manifest Great idea and platform you have there. I like the Marketplace feature as well. Just one thing: can you make the width of the blog posts wider? It looks a little too compact.

Also, is Travel Lounge open to Nigerian university students abroad to share their experience in their respective countries? I feel like this unexplored niche might bring more audience to your site.

1 Like
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Thanks Zee. Travelling is huge and the future is bright for Nigerian avid travellers. Visas will be easier to get over time and a lot of Nigerians will be travelling for pleasure. Your suggestions are also being considered and they will be rolled out once we get necessary traction. An escrow system is what we suggest but nothing to rush for now. The platform is good to go but we need users more than we need functionalities.

The word hustle sounds bizarre…our vision and mission at Travel Lounge drives me

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Cheers! I read the story of this fella on medium sometime ago and I thought Travel Lounge marketplace is definitely on the right track.

Were you at the board meeting? :grinning:

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@manifest Just read the story on Medium. Very sad, but looks like he founded Noirebnb. Great to see people finding solutions to problems.

Haha, it’s good to know we are thinking on the same page. Great minds think alike :smiley: