This startup turned down a US$250K offer from a local TV reality show

Check out if this travel portal got guts.

Flocations aggregates travel products to find what's available to each travelers and make it easy for them to select the ones matching their wishes.

Founders boast that it's very different from any other travel search product, which all focus on finding the price once the person knows where they want to go.

“Many people don't know, or even don't care of the destination. It is said that around 40% of visitors on an airline website are just browsing destinations. They just know they want to travel. The important part is the experience, what they will do once there. Hence Flocations allows to compare destinations available to a person (because a traveller from Singapore will not go to NYC for a weekend for example, but has 50+ destinations available by flight from the closest airport... which would take a lot of time to compare manually - I know it, I used to spend nights doing it,” said co-founder Florian Cornu

After starting with flights, Cornu said that the company is now integrating full packages, so that their users can have an answer to their question "What can I do for $500 next weekend?", by getting both flights and accommodations for them.

“ The vision is to provide traveller the fastest, easiest, most fun experience to find their trips. Many criteria are to be considered as it's not just about flights, hotels, places, but things like weather, activities, seasons, people have to be considered. Think about it, what is your best travel experience? if you have been in a perfect place but it was raining, that probably ruined your trip. On the other hand, an underrated place might have been fantastic for you because you met a local artist, other travellers or even your partner”

How the company started?

According to Cornu, the corporate story of Flocations is that it started as a StartupUpWeekend project, with a "wow effect" on Sunday evening.

“Imagine, in 54h we had acquired flight schedules and prices from different Southeast Asia airlines, mapped them and made it fun to search flight destinations.”

According to Cornu, the team remained together to work part time on it for a few months, until it turned down US$250,000 from Singapore TV reality show Angel's Gate and went to startup accelerator JFDI.

“JFDI's Demo Day introduced us to more than 10 serious investors. We reviewed the people involved in the different funds, the value they would bring to the table and the personality matches to analyse the different term sheets we received. We chose to go with TNF Ventures and announced a S$700k funding in December 2013.”

The Team

The team could not be more international than it is: 4 cofounders, 5 nationalities, 6 languages.

“We have backgrounds ranging from VoIP, M&A in a big smartphone company, Finance in a leading Asset Manager firm,” said Cornu.

According to Cornu, the four founders are now all based in Singapore. Founders believe Singapore to be the fastest growing travel market with middle class expanding on a daily basis.

He notes that the 3 biggest aircrafts orders in history have been made by Asian companies over the past 2 years (AirAsia, Lion Air and IndiGo).

Corporate Profile

Name of the company:
Flocations

Founder/Founders
Shaw Chian
Venkatraman Dhamodaran
Tudor Coman
Florian Cornu

Website:
Flocations.com

Major Investors:
TNF Ventures, Singtel Innov8, JFDI

Total funding at hand:
S$715,000

Start of operation: 2012