Leading brand helping people live active lifestyles acquires real-time activities reservation system TripFlavor, creating industry's most complete end-to-end platform for consumers and merchants in $60 billion global activities market.
SAN FRANCISCO – ZOZI announced the acquisition of real-time tours and activities Software as a Service reservation system, TripFlavor, along with the launch of ZOZI Advance, a real-time booking, scheduling, payments, and customer relationship management SaaS platform for activity merchants. ZOZI is actively engaged with several other companies and will be completing additional acquisitions in the industry later this year. This announcement is the latest in a string of significant milestones for the company related to the development of the first full end-to-end active lifestyle platform built on three core pillars: inspiration, commerce, and technology.
The ZOZI Guru team (the inspiration component) is made up of 13 activity category leading celebrities led by global phenomenon Bear Grylls, host of NBC’s new summer hit show: “Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls.” The ZOZI Gurus inspire people to Get Out There and connect with ZOZI’s local experiences, getaways, and gear (the commerce component). Finally, and announced today, the ZOZI Advance platform (the technology component), provides real-time bookings, scheduling, payments and customer management for activity merchants.
“The TripFlavor acquisition, successful integration, and launch of ZOZI Advance marks an important milestone for the company,” said TJ Sassani, CEO, ZOZI. “The TripFlavor team built an incredible technology platform that solved specific problems for both our customers and merchants. For our customers: ZOZI Advance will soon enable real-time bookings across thousands of our activities in the US and Canada – and soon globally. For our merchants: it enables real-time bookings, scheduling, payments, and customer management for their entire business. ZOZI Advance is unique for activity merchants because it’s the first platform to also bring substantial, high-quality new customer flow to the merchant via a branded channel, ZOZI.com.”
TripFlavor launched in 2011 as an OpenTable-style platform for activities and tours and was started by CEO and co-founder Sam Edelson, an early Airbnb employee, and Gene Drabkin, CTO and co-founder, a former Ning engineer. Tripflavor’s team expanded the technology platform to serve a large number of activity merchants across many activity categories. The two-year old startup raised a seed round of financing in late 2011 from prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs including Nathan Blecharczyk (co-founder & CTO of Airbnb); Mark Leslie (founder, chairman and CEO of Veritas Software); and Ken Keller (co-founder of IGN Entertainment).
“We’re thrilled to be joining forces with ZOZI,” said Sam Edelson, CEO and co-founder, TripFlavor. “The technology that our team worked so hard to build, combined with ZOZI’s strong brand, merchant network, ZOZI Gurus, and passionate customers, creates a much needed solution in an industry that is poised for disruption. The large activities market has long been underserved because most companies lack several pieces to the puzzle. After meeting with many potential strategic partners, it was clear that ZOZI had all the pieces in place and we wanted our technology to be part of the platform that will ultimately power the entire active lifestyle market.”
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
