Startups Stories Series: The Pivot to B2B Is Not the Promised Land
Photo Credit: Yapta is working on providing corporations and travel agencies with tools to ensure that they are getting the best airfares and hotel rates for their employees. Pictured are Paul Pavlish (right), a Yapta engineer/software developer, and director of sales Jay Languein. Yapta
Skift Take
Travel startups pivoting from a consumer business toward a B2B focus is trendy, with founders and CEOs believing that there will be fewer marketing woes and reduced competition. But get in line when it comes to joining the droves of startups trying to sell to big corporations, hotels and travel agencies. The sales hurdle can be almost as intractable as the marketing roadblock.
Angels and venture capital firms considering investments in travel startups salivate at the prospect of a winning consumer startup because historically that's where the vast majority of the enterprise value has been created.
In our Skift Startup Stories series, we document travel startup issues, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers.
You can read all of the stories in the series here.
In travel, notable exceptions in the form of success stories on the business to business, or enterprise, side of the ledger include flight-pricing engine ITA Software, which Google acquired for $700 million in 2011, and hospitality-software firm Micros Systems, which Oracle bought for $5.3 billion in 2014.
But these are the exceptions. In light of the torrent of consumer-startup failures in travel, many newbie companies pivot to a business to business focus out of desperation and with the thought that this can'
