Whether you are exploring a new city or your own hometown, LocalNav gives you access to personalized, targeted itineraries based on your interests, your location, and how much time you.
If you happen to be in the hospitality industry, even better and listen up: LocalNav is a trip-planning and activity-metrics gathering platform for hospitality and tourism organizations. There’s both desktop and mobile versions to help visitors quickly discover fun, interesting things to do based on their interests, where they’re staying, and how much time they have. Visitors can easily customize, share, and navigate their itineraries, allowing them to plan less, do more, and go explore. Hospitality and tourism organizations use LocalNav to extend their brand outside their venue, to enhance their visitors’ experiences, to deepen their relationship with local merchants, whom they can feature within their custom channel, and to gain insights into their visitors’ activities, preferences, and demographics.
Founder and CEO Brian Sanders gives us the lay of the land.
Tell us about the product.
LocalNav is a hosted, brandable activity-planning and metrics-gathering solution for hospitality and tourism organizations.
How is it different?
LocalNav provides convention centers, destination marketing organizations, and hotels with the ability to offer their visitors self-service tools that extend their brand outside the venue, while providing analytics on visitor behavior, preferences, and demographics back to the organization. LocalNav is brandable and customizable by the organization, and is fully hosted, so there are no IT costs.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
There are 200 destination marketing organizations, 414 convention centers, and over 51,000 hotels within the US. Annually, those organizations attract more than 875 million visitors.
What is the business model?
LocalNav is a freemium SaaS model. We create a dedicated, branded channel for each property, and provide customers with the ability to feature specific businesses and itineraries, as well as view reports on visitor behavior, preferences, and demographics. While the product is always free for visitors, we have three tiers of service for our hospitality and tourism customers, with the first tier being free and the higher two tiers requiring a monthly fee. These higher tiers provide additional functionality, customization, and metrics. We monetize the user base of all tiers, including the free tier, by offering deals, bookings, and affiliate offers to visitors, as well as licensing our anonymized data to third parties.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We have signed an agreement to be the exclusive provider of activity-planning software for the two convention centers in Boston (the BCEC and the Hynes Convention Center.) We plan on bringing on board 2-5 additional pilot customers, expanding the product and monetization features, and growing our initial user base.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
We would love to talk to Bessemer Ventures, as we believe their experience in location-based community sites (such as Yelp) would be an excellent fit with LocalNav.
Why are you launching in New York?
First, New York is the largest travel hub in the US, giving us local access to hundreds of potential customers and millions of potential users. Second, New York is where many of our target customers have their headquarters and marketing functions. Finally, but not least, New York is undergoing an amazing transformation into one of the pre-eminent centers of innovation and investment in the world. The energy here is contagious, and we want to be part of this city’s evolution.
What’s your favorite leisure time activity in NY?
I’d like to say it’s running, around Central Park and down the Hudson River Park, but truth be told, we spend more time sampling various culinary spots and eating, eating, eating our way through the city.
