Interview with Paolo Taricco, CEO of Yookye

Interview with Paolo Taricco, CEO of Yookye, an innovative platform that revolutionizes the concept of travel. 

“The journey is never a question of money, but of courage”, said Paolo Coelho and Yookye want to bring this: the courage to embark on a journey towards innovation. 

Yookye is the first experiential tourism platform where you can find tailor-made, certified and finally “true” holidays. No, we are not saying that other booking portals give us “lies”, we are just saying that with Yookye travel becomes REALLY discover the territories in their most hidden intimacy, thanks to local experts who will know how to approach the culture of the place. Let’s try to understand something more!

What is Yookye

Yookye is a tourist portal through which you can configure your holiday based on your interests and travel ideas. The steps to follow to start living the experience are 4: 

1. Express your preferences through the interactive form of the portal, choose the area to visit, the experiences you would like to try and the services you need 
2. Receive by mail 3 travel proposals elaborated by our Local Experts, including holiday home to stay, experiences to play on the territory, services required. In addition you will receive extra content on the territory, accompanied by photos and reviews
3. Choose the proposal most suitable or configure it from the options sent by Local Experts
4. Book, pay and go!

The advantages of travelling with Yookye

Travelling with Yookye means being able to configure holidays tailored and in line with your expectations. In addition, thanks to the Local Experts you will have the opportunity to know at 100% the territory you want to visit: it will be their care to offer you facilities, experiences, services and placesunmissable!

Lastly, on the portal you will have the opportunity to review your experience and read the reviews of thousands of other people, certified, real and reliable. 

What are you waiting for? Go on a trip with Yookye and if you are not yet convinced, read the interview with Paolo Taricco, CEO of the company.

Hello Paolo, nice to meet you and thank you for your time. Yookye: tell us this beautiful story.

Yookye is an innovative startup founded in 2018 and an operating platform in the field of experiential tourism. We are 5 members of Alba and our idea is to offer for tourists tailor-made travel proposals, created by local experts based on the needs and aspirations of users, with the added value of safety reviews, certified by blockchain technology. Yookye was born to promote the Territories. Through Local Experts, the platform allows you to live unique experiences,  promoting territories and staying overnight in characteristic  accomodations. The Local Expert selects on the territory and inserts in the platform the providers of experiences. In the first phase of the growth model we started by developing the promotion of the Italian market. Then we will export the business to European territories. 

How and when was Yookye’s idea born?

At the beginning of 2018, we felt the need for something new in the Italian tourist scene and not only. Something that would promote the territories, which do so through accomodations in the extra-hotel sector, and also by combining experiences. Experiences certified first by local experts and then safe holidays through reviews on blockchain.

How long did it take to build the project? 

The initial step was about 6 months. We created the project draft , after we focused on the creation of a company and formed a first team of people who could follow up what we had in mind.

Who is Yookye targeting? How is the market responding?

It is aimed at an evolved traveler, a person or couple or family of an average high target who likes to discover the territories. So live them as the local lives, however, according to their passions.  The market is responding very well because it feels more and more the need to live an experiential holiday and especially custom. 

With digital transformation, the way of travelling has also inevitably changed. How does Yookye differ from other platforms? 

First of all, the modern traveller, especially after the Covid pandemic, will increasingly need a holiday away from the masses, to know the territories, discover their traditions and deal with a secure platform with certified data. So Yookye is first a tour operator and not a simple intermediation platform. It has a network of local experts: people who, thanks to the knowledge of their territory, provide the platform with all the experiences and services of their area of expertise. Another added value is the reliability of the holiday package: the offers are in fact certified by local experts and the related information (reviews) are recorded on Blockchain and therefore are immutable. Yookye also differentiates between the identified competitors, as well as being a Tour Operator, offers different and customized holiday packages thanks to local experts, so not standard group trips with a minimum of participants. And in addition confirmed on the interactive customer profiling form and by reviews certified by Blockchain technology

How did you launch your project? Did you launch crowdfunding campaigns?

We have been online since the end of 2019, initially with a test area on Langhe and Roero where we live. After  the Lockdown we moved to the Italian market in June 2020 (covering 15 out of 20 regions in Italy), and now we have the hope to open our destinations to foreign travelers. We will export our business model to the foreign markets of Spain and Greece.

In March we launched an equity crowfunding campaign on the portal www.hensoo.it  Minimum collection targets 300k with the hope of going further. We approached with a completely new platform, with which we were looking for investors with a minimum of 10k budget. 

It was not an easy goal because campaigns of this kind, especially the first ones, are successful if made on known platforms and with a minimum investment of a few hundred euros. But we didn’t just want investors, we had the ambition to bring with us entrepreneurs, businness Angel and partners who believed deeply in the project. This is how we brought aboard Giuseppe Miroglio, a well-known Italian entrepreneur and also twenty other investors.

The campaign on the portal ended successfully, with 380k collected, followed by another 10k immediately after the end of the campaign and now we have other contacts for 100k. With the money collected we are strengthening our marketing campaigns and equipping AI on the platform that will perform our response to the forms and will best outline the traveler.

Curiosities: do you also use Yookye to plan your holidays? 

 In fact, we used Yookye unknowingly even before it existed. We already planned our holidays with this modus operandi. In fact, this way we felt the need for something new. Once we realized that there wasn’t something like that, we said, “Let’s do it ourselves.“

Credits: 

https://yookye.com/it