The online travel booking market is saturated with both large companies and startups which want a share of an $847 billion dollar industry. But in this type of competitive environment, niche sites that offer personalized services that the big guys like Kayak and Expedia can’t do because of scale, can be successful. One such service is Kijubi, a booking engine for local outdoor activities and travel and a TechCrunch50 DemoPit startup. The startup aims to help people book surfing trips, indoor skydiving and other niche outdoor activities on its centralized platform. You can see a live demo of Kijubi and meet the startup’s founders at the DemoPit at next week’s conference. Please note that Kijubi’s site will not be launching until Monday, September 14, but you can email beta@kijubi.com to test out the site beforehand.
Kijubi allows you to research, plan and book a myriad of outdoor activities in a variety of locations around the United States, including California, Nevada, Maryland, and Florida. Kijubi’s co-founder and CEO Billy Fried started the company after finding that it was tough for consumers to book niche outdoor activities, like indoor skydiving or surfing lessons, on the internet because many of these independent operations are mom and pop type of businesses that don’t have an online presence.
That’s where Kijubi comes in. The startup aggregates all of these activity operators and will facilitate the booking of these activities for you. Plus, you can book all of your other travel, including flights, cars, and lodging on the site.
From sea kayaking to skydiving to discount theme park passes, Kijubi offers over 70 categories of outdoor activities that you can easily find by theme (i.e. kids, romance, luxury), location, and type (i.e. air, water, land). The beauty of Kijubi is that it’s comprehensive; you can book everything, including air, car, hotels, and activities, on one site. Another notable feature of the site is the ability to gift activities to friends or family.
Similar to other travel sites, Kijubi monetizes through commissions. Each time a user books a flight, activity, hotel etc., Kijubi takes a cut. Kijubi is also providing many activity vendors with the technology for e-commerce platforms, in which the startup is able to take a percentage of credit card processing fees. And of course, Kijubi will be advertising on its site.
As of now, Kijubi only covers four states in the U.S., but plans to expand within the U.S. as well as internationally. Even from personal experience, Kijubi seems like it adds value to the online travel industry. I know that when I’ve traveled, I often leave the planning of the activity portion of the trip until I get to the hotel, which leads to late-bookings and not always being able to participate in a desired activity. Next time, I’ll look too Kijubi to book my hot air balloon ride over Napa Valley or flying lesson in San Diego.
At TechCrunch50’s DemoPit next Monday and Tuesday, Kijubi will be giving away a bunch of cool outdoor activities from indoor skydiving to biking tours through Napa Valley via a Twitter contest. Follow Kijubi and Tweet following message “RT #Kijubi #TechCrunch50 and tell Kijubi why you should win an free pass to try out an outdoor activity like sailing lessons or a bike tour in Napa Valley. The most creative tweets will win activities. You can also enter by dropping a business card at Kijubi’s booth at the DemoPit.
Kijubi.com is asking for username/password ??
Password Protected Web Site – ATM
AAfter Search….
The site will officially launch on Monday 9/14 at the TechCrunch50 conference.
We are giving TechCrunch readers early access over the weekend.
Just email beta@kijubi.com and we’ll send you the private beta log-in info.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks!
-MK
Great site in CalActive- I’m excited to see Kijubi go live!
How does it compare with http://www.adventurelink.com?
Short domain names really are scarce aren’t they.
We’re more focused on everyday activities in domestic markets. Our goal is to have a critical mass of activities in the markets we enter – which are the major leisure destinations. From what I understand AdventureLink is more about adventure travel throughout the world – sort of like Viator. They have a few activities in lots of market, while we have a lot of activities in a few key markets. We want to give consumers a real choice, and show them the myriad of things to do in a given market.
Thanks for your interest. What Kijubi doing?
1. Branding mistake = “please call calactive for details”. And what details are those? Isnt this your own company? Why is the adventurer not calling kijubi?
2. Operating hours = “morning + afternoon” …um what?
I see the example is of your own company tour (http://www.lavi....com/tours.html see picture #7). Then why is the information not perfect? I see lots more detail on lavidalaguna.com.
How did you end up with 4.5 stars on a review of your own trip? i assume you rated yourself.
The 1 flaw with this approach is the variable commissions across suppliers. That makes it tricky for affiliates to understand what they earn. Other vendors will learn about 9% commissions and get upset. To make this really work i think you need to charge a premium commission and offer prime placement with OTA’s. Without relationships and proven scalable architecture, that becomes a stumbling block.
Are bookings using live/free cell availability? Usually the customer is only purchasing a reservation request and hope everything will work out and not get denied+refunded later on.
What was the learning experience from calactive that you are bringing to kijubi?
Good luck, I hope you figure out a winning formula.
hey, why would you link to pages if we can´t get there?
Is this just an extension of CalActive.com or is this a new business?
This appears to be a clone of CalActive with a better UI. A random search of several activities returned the *exact* same results as CalActive does.
The prices are the same, as well, as are the descriptions of the activities.
Either CalActive owns this site, or Kijubi is doing one hell of a job ripping off their content.
I take it back. The UI is actually more confusing. It lists all the options up front. This is fine for simple events, but for the more customizable ones, it is a nightmare just to figure out what is being selected. And since the customizable events are usually the more expensive ones, this is a big problem.
Even wierder, many of the reviews for events are the same as the reviews on the CalActive site.
And…the supposed “major differences” — the ability to filter activities by category, and gifting — are the exact same as the CalActive site…EXCEPT that Kijuki borked the order within categories (jetskis are more romantic than a sunset gondola ride??? a gondola ride is more “family” than legoland???), and gifting is more complicated with Kijuki.
Right now, Kijuki needs to be upfront about how and why all of its Cali activities are the exact same as the activities on the CalActive website. Because if it can’t, I’m going to assume it’s a scam and stick to a known operator.
Someone sure as hell didn’t do their research when vetting this company.
我看不明白也不理解，我是一个初学者，也是刚学习上网的老人，我的网址现在关闭了因没有交足资金
What a HORRENDOUS name. Imagine telling your friends about some ‘kijubi’ site..they’ll think you’re talking about some new sushi place in town
In my experience, no matter how “home-brew” are operations, they end up needing “space” to differentiate from competitors. Say you are a surfing school, chance are that your competitor is just 50m down the beach…. how do you deliver your competitive edge without the opportunity to tell more than a single-page review. Eventually the smarter-and-smarter search engines will manage to pick any relevant site regardless to the presence of aggregators like Kijubi… I believe these guys need their own booking platform, like shopify.com for tourism product.
Greetings Jorge and Marc,
Thanks for taking the time to check out the site and provide your feedback.
CalActive was built by the founders of Kijubi about 18 months ago to establish a proof of concept for this model in the key leisure market of California.
CalActive quickly hit revenue and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the initial userbase, which encouraged the founders to take the model national and eventually global under the Kijubi brand.
All of the activities, reviews and ratings from CalActive have been migrated to Kijubi, which is why you’re able to see real ratings and reviews for activities at the time of launch. All of the reviews are from actual participants and were collected in user surveys sent out 24 hours after their activities.
We appreciate you pointing out the “Call CalActive” and providing insight on your experience with the UI…..precisely the feedback we need from our early beta testers.
Puranjay…The name is meant to be a simple, fun play off of “What Kijubi Doing”. I guess it could be worse than to sound like a Sushi Restaurant.
Thanks all for the feedback. We will it all into account as we iterate on the site and execute on our plan.
-MK
I have to say, keep the CalActive name. Or change it to WestActive. But Kijbui = utter fail. I had a good idea of what CalActive was about without ever having visited the site, based on the name alone.
But kijubi? Not a damn clue. It’s also not a name I’d remember well enough to keep using.
Jorge,
Thanks for the input. We tried a million names that had active, fun, play in it. But they were boring. Sorry you don’t like Kijubi. We do. And BTW, would you have any idea what Yahoo, Google and Twitter do by their names?
Yahoo? Not doing so well.
Twitter? It is what it calls itself — a site about twits (which the dictionary defines as short, idiotic/silly statements, or a silly/idiotic person). BTW, they still haven’t figured out how to make money yet.
The 1000s of other sites with stupid, unique names that are now in the DeadPool? Obviously, they died.
Google is the exception to the rule.
OK, something isn’t adding up here.
Calactive is quantified and only showing ~15K monthly visitors during peak season….how can there be enough transactions on that site to claim it is a success? Unless those conversions are off the charts….hmmm…..
also, what the hell is this? On the Kijubibibititi Facebook page, they reference this link – http://www.kijubigirls.com/
oh man, good use of marketing dollars boys. good luck with this.
Dear TC……TC50….really?
It will be wonderful in Rafting by Kijiubi launches.
Look forward