Monday, August 1, 2011 | By: Joseph Christian

From our latest issue: how two entrepreneurs, a banking whiz and a tech geek changed the way you travel

The popular narrative regarding web startups usually goes something like this: Obscenely bright young guy (OBYG) comes up with a great idea. OBYG jumps on idea and puts it into action. OBYG drops out of Ivy League college and makes billions of dollars.

It’s the rock-star fairytale of web startups. But sometimes, brilliant ideas don’t work that way. Sometimes the stars don’t align and good ideas go into a slumber, waiting for the right people and the right time to ease them out of hibernation. No one knows this better than the founder of Trekiz.com, Tian Wenqing.

Though he didn’t know it then, late fall of 2008 would prove a fateful time for Tian Wenqing, who for nearly eight years had been sitting on an idea—an idea, he hoped, would revolutionize the way tourists travel in China. One evening at a local restaurant he found himself sitting a table’s length away from Matthew Jaskol, a friend of a friend and a recent Yale MBA graduate looking for a startup in China. “So Wenqing, have you ever thought about being an entrepreneur?” Jaskol’s wife asked. Tian laughed with delight and reached for his bag.

Rewind 11 years, when Tian was a second-year MBA student at the London School of Business. It was there, during the dot-com boom of the late-90s that Tian came up with the notion of a web platform that would solve the problems travelers faced while planning trips to his homeland.

The idea was simple but, for its users, potentially revolutionary: a website that would allow foreigners to plan trips to China themselves, bypassing the thorny and overpriced tour packages that lure in so many non-China-savvy travelers. The tours are often boring, and include countless middlemen whose nominal roles serve only to jack up the price. Tian’s mantra? DIY.

“I wanted to make a website with all the tools and information needed to design a trip according to your own interests and needs,” Tian said.

For the next two months, he poured his time into finding a way to blast through the cultural barriers and middlemen that stood in the way of making Do-It-Yourself (DIY) travel more mainstream and accessible. The only thing Tian had to show for his efforts was a notebook of unpromising research. Even if he could have found the right people to help him set up the project it wouldn’t have made a difference—the technological limitations of the internet at that time were too great.

The website’s first sign of life came ten years later when Tian received a call from an old colleague, Hong Kong investment banker Ricky Chan who was visiting on business. Tian had always been impressed by Chan’s work ethic and professionalism.

The pair met for beers in the posh lobby restaurant of the Kerry Center Hotel in Beijing. Tian got serious, and asked Chan about his future ambitions.

“Actually, I want to have my own business,” Chan said. “There is a lot that could be done to share travel information through the internet.”

Tian jumped, surprised at his luck. Taking a deep breath, he launched into an hour-long pitch, explaining his vision for online travel planning. By the end of the night Chan was interested in joining.

A year and a half later Tian found himself facing Matthew Jaskol and his wife at dinner. Tian pulled out his business plan and began to explain his vision. The couple looked at each other puzzled. After his meeting with Chan, Tian had carefully researched market data, summed up the competition, analyzed trends and drafted his plan. He found that DIY travel was still the largest trend, but that no new platform could provide travelers with a true do-it-yourself trip arrangement service. He also found that the technology now existed to create such a service.

“Wenqing really had an innovative idea, I felt inspired!” Jaskol recalled of the evening. His wife was also impressed and encouraged her husband to keep discussing the idea with Tian.

In February of 2009, Tian, Chan and Jaskol met and agreed to form Trekiz. While Chan worked on the financials in Hong Kong, Tian and Jaskol met weekly to try and find a solution to how a travel company could make money without stuffing travelers into dull packaged tours.

Tian and Jaskol realized that the only way to address the problem was to change the rules of game. Their idea was to bypass the fee-grabbing jungle of middlemen, and bring users straight to the source, by allowing local travel providers to offer their services directly through their site.

“We wanted our business environment to be like an ecosystem where things were mutually dependent on each other,” Jaskol says. “That way, in the end, everyone could win and had an incentive to work together.”

By the end of 2009, Trekiz had been officially registered, and both Tian and Jaskol were committed full-time. There was still one problem. They had no IT guy to bring their ideas to life on the internet.

“We needed more than just skills; we needed someone that understood our vision and was willing to work in a start-up environment,” Tian explains. In December of 2009 they met their man: Wang Yanfeng.

Originally from Hebei, Wang was a senior software engineer and fellow haigui (海龟, sea turtle) or someone who returns to China after studying abroad. He stood out because, unlike other candidates, he understood exactly what Trekiz was trying to do. After watching his wife spend over a month trying to organize the details of their honeymoon online, he was convinced there must be an easier way to do DIY travel. Within months after joining, his team had built a unique travel planning system and applied for a patent with the Chinese authorities.

The beauty of Wang’s travel planner was that it allowed users to simply set dates, pick flights, hotels and activities in any order they liked. The program did all the legwork, turning users’ choices into a real-time schedule and budget, while they were looking at pictures and reading background information.

“It is pretty technical but basically what we did was marry a cache system, to store the choices you make, with a real-time data synchronization tool to make sure all the legwork with the budget and schedule are accurate,” Wang says. “You might not understand it, but believe me it works.”

The technology behind the idea was so innovative that before Trekiz even launched their website, they had already been named one of the top 100 most innovative startup companies in the world by Red Herring, the same group of editors that first took notice of startups like Facebook and Twitter.

While Wang was busy building the engine to run their ecosystem, Tian and Jaskol were out finding partners to populate it with. Changing the way a market was used to operating wasn’t easy.

Trekiz had an especially hard time convincing tour companies to accept the strict quality service rules that governed their ecosystem. When tours were purchased, Trekiz would withhold payment to tour companies for seven days to ensure quality standards were met.

“Our website wasn’t live. At times convincing companies to buy into our ideas was like trying to cut through a mountain of solid stone,” Tian says.

In March 2011 they officially launched their website, complete with over 500 activities from 117 travel partners from every corner of China. The site is accompanied by a blog that provides personalized accounts of travel in China, complete with the kinds of pictures you might spot on someone’s vacation album—beaches, city streets, and girls posing next to monstrously oversized durian fruit. It may not be the kind of picture-perfect postcard images that travelers are used to seeing, but it certainly looks a lot more DIY—and a lot more fun.

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