Introduction

Who am I

Hi, I am Larry and I am the founder of Sotravel. Most of you have not met me yet but I am excited to get to know you soon! Over the last 2 weeks, I was in Indonesia for four Sotravel trips and I will be sharing what I have learnt, as well as what I think the future of Sotravel would look like.

What Sotravel does

We connect adventurers and make amazing experiences happen.

Learnings & changes to come

Beyond hosted trips

To avoid confusion, the host refers to a Singaporean host. All our trips comes with local guides and instructors.

A big struggle we faced early on is how do we keep the quality of a Sotravel trip high while keeping costs low. Our initial solution was to place a trusted Singaporean host on all our trips because I thought that the host was what makes or breaks a trip. But after having hosted over 6 trips, I have come to the realisation that:

1) I was never the life of the party on these trips, the participants were ☃️

2) Our travellers are super independent and every small administrative issue that came up during a trip would have been solved if we had a pre-trip Zoom call

So while I was stressing over a non-essential problem of finding a host for each trip, I forgot about the actual problem we were trying to solve in the first place.

The actual problem

Just recently, I was proposing a ski trip to India to a friend of mine but unfortunately, he was not interested in visiting India. I then thought to myself that lucky for me, Sotravel exists. Because the truth is if Sotravel didn’t exist, I would have had a hard time finding people to join me on this adventure, and I would likely never make it to India in this lifetime.

So in essence, the main problem Sotravel is trying to solve is to help make group adventures happen.

How to solve this problem

To solve this problem, we must now focus on two things:

1) Increase supply: Provide as many adventure options as possible so that everyone gets what they want. Currently, there is no ski trip in India on Sotravel (coming really soon though) 👀

2) Increase demand: To ensure groups get formed, we need to increase awareness by getting as many people as possible to follow our social media pages (Telegram / Whatsapp / Instagram / TikTok)

Hence, over the next few months, we will be onboarding a lot more new overseas partners while also boosting our marketing efforts. PS please help us with marketing so we can continue to keep costs down! There’s only so much we can do as a 3 people team.

So no more hosted trips?

Of course not! We are not removing hosted trips. In fact, most trips will be still hosted. These are the situations where there will be a Singaporean host:

1) Our Great Trips: These are our bigger trips and a host is necessary to contain the chaos 🎉

2) First-time trips: The host is mainly there to reduce uncertainty as well as document the trip process 📝

A new way to start a group trip

A lot of our best trips actually started as a request on Telegram.

So to make it simpler for everyone, we have rolled out an update to our website that lets you easily choose a trip you like and submit a date that works for you.

Final words

The Community

At every step of the way, we strive to do what’s best for the adventure community in Singapore!

Sotravel can be quite a daunting experience to step into especially if it's your first time. NGL I too was so nervous on my first trip in April.

But once you have experienced it once, you will realise that it's all good. Everyone on the trip is just a friend that you have not met yet 🤷‍♀️ 

To Summarise

Over the next few months, we will be accelerating our trip offerings.

Whether it's diving in the Great Barrier Reef, Safaris in Africa, or Skiing in India we will attempt to cover as much ground as possible so that there is something for everyone. 👊

We will temporarily shift our attention to catering to trips for smaller groups (4-8 pax) and our goal is to make every adventure happen.

Love our vision and want to help out?

You can help us out by:

1) Tell us your adventure plans for 2024. If possible we will try and set the trip up asap! (Drop me a message on Telegram @larrylee3107)

2) Help to share our telegram group with your friends!