We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gary Kohn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Gary, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?
Social Media has become the place to find and discover products and places to go. What many people don’t know about travel is that 86% of all travelers choose their next vacation on social media and then spend 10-20 hours of research on multiple websites to build a trip just presented to them. Social e-commerce has made millionaries out of influencers and content creators. “Shopifying” travel has yet to be done.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was a former film producer prior to starting Luxury Travel Hackers. A few years back I was invited to work up in the Twitter incubator as an observer for a few weeks. I became fascinated with how technology and content where starting to come together. That is where the idea was born out of.. Make content bookable for travel! It was a light bulb that went off and I was off to the races! We are making the point of discovery bookable for travel enthusists.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
In the beginning I went out to a few close friends and got one person to invest in us. I also put some of my own money into the company. That allowed us to figure out what we were building and understand the market we were trying to capture.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
Startups are their own animal. It seems you are always on the verge of massive success or massive failure and it changes daily. We’ve been in multiple situations where we weren’t sure how we were gonna make the next payroll and pulled it off at the last minute. It’s sory of like getting a blimp off the ground. It’s very difficult but once its up it flies very steady.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://luxurytravelhackers.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luxurytravelhackers_vacation/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/luxurytravelhackers
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/luxury-travel-hackers/?viewAsMember=true
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Luxurytravelha1
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@luxurytravelhackers