Sadia is the co-founder and CEO of ShareTrip, one of Bangladesh's biggest online travel platforms for flights, hotels and more. Before starting the business she spent 11 to 12 years in a corporate career, mostly in marketing, branding and communication. She and her husband, ShareTrip's other co-founder from a sales background, built the company together.
In this episode Ahmed Fahad goes back to where it started, through the pandemic pivot, to where ShareTrip stands today, and what it's like to build a company with your spouse.
From a travel habit to Travel Booking Bangladesh
After they married in 2007 the couple traveled every year on budget-friendly plans of their own. Colleagues and friends started asking them to plan their trips too, until they began taking a service charge. In 2014 that became Travel Booking Bangladesh, started as a side project while her husband was working at Banglalink. He left his job that year to run it full-time.
They didn't want to be one more traditional travel agent ("go around the Banani road, you will see hundreds"), so they bootstrapped toward an online business. The early growth came from word of mouth and Facebook ads on budgets of $10 to $15, backed by answering every query, day and night. To get the technology, they started with Sabre as their first global distribution system, because they knew a senior official there, and later added others. Her answer to how two people without a technical background figured it out: homework. They talked to anyone and everyone in the travel industry.
ShareTrip
They met their first investors in 2018 and relaunched as ShareTrip in 2019. They chose a name that wasn't tied to Bangladesh or to flights alone. It launched as a full end-to-end travel platform with gamification and loyalty features.
When COVID-19 stopped outbound travel, ShareTrip moved into B2B. It built an in-house platform for offline travel agents, at a time when migrant workers still had to get back abroad. Sadia calls the pandemic a blessing in disguise for moving the industry online. Since then:
- ST Rooms: a domestic hotel inventory system, with more than 1,100 domestic hotels and resorts on board.
- Travel add-ons, like COVID tests and insurance, so customers don't have to leave the platform.
- STP: ShareTrip's payment solution, launched on November 19. It's a wallet built into a wider lifestyle ecosystem of shops, vouchers, utility bills, mobile top-up and money transfers.
The numbers she shared
At the time of this episode (December 2023):
- Retention: month-on-month transacting customer retention never fell below about 69 to 70 percent, and averaged 75 to 76 percent.
- Market share (by ShareTrip's own data): more than 50 percent of the online travel market, and around 12 to 13 percent of the offline market.
- Funding: $4.5 million raised since 2018. Startup Bangladesh reinvested on its fourth anniversary.
- Profitability: ShareTrip is not yet profitable overall, though it has hit profit margins in some months.
What holds the industry back
Her main example is regulation. A single online card transaction is capped at $300, and the travel quota is $12,000 a year. Paying international hotel suppliers is hard under the rules on outward remittance, so ShareTrip worked with Bangladesh Bank on a foreign currency account route, because "we cannot be non-compliant at any cost."
Her advice
- Don't build a startup on the side. "You cannot be successful being on two roads at the same time."
- Solve a real problem in any sector, from education and health to agriculture and travel; it doesn't have to be a unique idea.
- Be patient. ShareTrip is four years old, but counting Travel Booking Bangladesh the journey is almost ten.
What the conversation covers
- From corporate careers to Travel Booking Bangladesh
- Word of mouth and $10 Facebook budgets
- Learning the travel back end: Sabre and global distribution systems
- First investors and the rename to ShareTrip
- The COVID pivot to B2B
- ST Rooms, value-added services and the STP wallet
- Retention, market share and funding
- Startups versus profitable traditional businesses
- Working with your spouse, culture and transparency
- Regulatory limits on online travel, and the startup ecosystem