Today I met Roy Andrada, a VP from Infohub.com at my hotel. We walked across the street to the Marin County Brewing Co. for lunch. Roy and partner Jim Zhu used to work together at Sun Microsystems and back in 1993 decided to start their own travel portal. “We saw what Yahoo and others were doing and we wanted to do the same, so we found our niche–specialty travel.”
Roy and Jim’s site is huge—a directory of more than 14,000 unique tours and specialized lodgings and receive about 700,000 unique visitors each month. I was eager to learn more about how they’ve achieved such success and wanted to pick his brain about how he got there. We recently became a partner with them when we added their directory to GoNOMAD.
The main thing I learned from Roy is that focus is important. While there are many distractions that come at you from this travel affiliate or that big advertiser trying to steer you in different directions, the best way to succeed is to decide your priorities and stay your own course. Roy and Jim focused on building traffic and relationships with travel suppliers. Now they have more than 3500 tour companies and lodges whose trips are sold on the site. They resist adding links off the site and keep their customers in mind–fast loading pages and no where to go but to search for their tours. Good lessons I’m trying to remember as we move GoNOMAD ahead.
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Onward ond upward! Bet it was a good meet. Now you two go and enjoy the vino.