Booking Golf Trips Just Got Easier: Inside a Travel Tech Startup

0:05Miral I'm a I'm gonna pick your brain now you give a mic by chance awesome cool so tell me a little bit about your background. You come from a sports family and you're doing some really cool stuff in the sports world. So my name is Mirelle Monte Calvo and first of all I'm up here with a lot of giants and I'm feeling like a little leprechaun. I'm just missing my green jacket. I come from a family of sports. My uncle was a fencer in the 1960 Olympics. My mom was a diver so it skipped a generation. I missed it. So I don't fit exactly here. But I started a travel technology company that's changing the way you book sports travel.

0:45It's pretty cool. Can you talk about it a little bit? Yeah, sure. The name of the company is Trip Fusion by VKU. And what we've done is we've created the Connected Trip, which is basically being able to book your golf, your hotel, all of the disparate systems, events, anything, all with the hotel, all online, check out immediately in one shot. And we're with Golf Now and Trin. We just launched. I've done events at hotels before, and it's really challenging to book everything because you have to talk to multiple people, the cater people, the event people, right? So you're solving that whole entire problem.

1:23You don't have to do it anymore. You can go online and you can actually book in real time. You can book your event. You can book your hotel. You can do it all. Wow. And check out. And you can get multiple rounds of golf, too, which Golf Now hasn't actually figured out how to do on their own sites. But we've got it happening on our site. Nice. Aaron's a big golfer. He golfs all the time. You'll have to use our site. So tell me how you came up with the idea. We actually started as a wellness travel company, which is also a massive market. We couldn't scale because we were one of the failure part of, I guess, the beginning of being a startup.

1:57up. We couldn't scale because you couldn't book spa with your hotel and you'd end up like canceling your hotel or whatever the case may be. And, or you'd have to find a way, it just wasn't scalable. And so we put everything on hold. We decided to build the technology and, uh, and one thing led to another and it turned out it worked for golf. However, when I met the president of golf now or the president of NBC sports, I was like, I'm going to continue to go the spa route until I realized how big the golf market was. And then here we are. And yeah, we went live with them about a year and a half ago and killed it.

2:35Congrats. What do you find the difference between or the similarities between elite athletes and elite founders? Very much the same type of stuff. Resilience. You have to keep playing. You have to keep pushing through. You have to practice. You've got to take the nose. You've got to be able to, you know, you just have to be able to keep fighting, right? I mean, I would assume that's what you have to do. And as an athlete, you have to, you know, you have to do it over and over again until you get it right. And also being a team player, having a really great team, having good people around you, things of that nature.

3:09How do you stay mentally resilient within your company? I am someone who really works out a lot. So I think that plays a lot into how your mind and wellness. Obviously, I started a wellness travel company originally. But I think it really comes down to how you treat your body, how you live your life and who you're surrounded by. What do you find that the major roles wellness has played in your life, but also what you're seeing, how it's impacting other people on your site? it's changing because wellness is really wellness and travel are merging and sports they're all becoming very connected to each other um i think people are starting to really when they travel now they're starting to think about where they're going and what goes into it and um you know how does it um and it's turned into like a 1.8 trillion dollar market which is absolutely insanity or it's on track to be.

4:07So I would say that it's just, I mean, even this morning, I got up and I worked out before I did anything because mentally to stay on track for the day and to be able to lead the team and whatever the case may be, as these guys probably know from being in sports, you have to be on it all the time. What do you find with the challenges you've gone through as a founder that the top two or three, I would say like values in a human that gets you past those challenges? That's a good question. I mean, I think, you know, we all know that a lot of startups fail, right? I mean, I think it's the numbers are really high.

4:48I don't know them off the top of my head, but they're very high. I think you have to be someone who continues to push through and not give up. You always have to take the bad with the good. You have to be able to take the no's. I heard actually with the interview you did with Chris as well and I'm like you know what that's how it is, it really is you've got to be able to just get back up and hey just brush it off and move on and I'm in sales, my background is sales so if you can't take a no they say some will, some won't, so what who's next, you know, I mean you just gotta do it, I mean you keep going you keep fighting until you make it Love it, awesome, give her a round of applause everybody, thank you so much appreciate it

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