Door Advisor
TripAdvisor (a company started in Needham, MA- go Boston!) announced its partnership with DoorDash a week ago (11/28) and I spent some time understanding why these two interesting, but seemingly unrelated businesses (travel booking and food delivery), would want to work together.
It turns out, people who travel also eat food. TripAdvisor claims to be the “worlds largest travel site” — their business is in connecting travelers with transportation, destinations, and experiences. When a person finds themselves 1000 miles away from home, in a hotel with no restaurant, and experiences hunger, TripAdvisor would be a fool to not try and help out there.
DoorDash to the rescue. DoorDash, founded in 2012 by 4 Y-Combinator graduates, has been gaining popularity as an on-demand food courier service across the U.S and Canada. Even with all of the competition in this space (GrubHub, Caviar, UberEats- to name a few) they are doing really well and expanding rapidly. Why?
In my opinion, there are 2 reasons.
1. DoorDash is more than a food delivery service — they are a logistics company. I know you’re rolling your eyes. “They deliver pizza, give me a break they aren’t UPS” — or are they? I happened to listen to founder Tony Xu explain the DoorDash business on a podcast a few weeks ago. The amount of research their team does when preparing to open a new market is so exhaustive that they make it hard to compete. For example, they know where every parking lot is for each restaurant they deliver from- if the restaurant is in a mall, they set up private elevator access and reserve driver parking spots in the garage ahead of time. Their use of technology to measure and maintain quality for customers is unsurpassed.
2. DoorDash has a ton of great partners. Beyond their obvious restaurant partnerships, they have deals with companies like GenZe (zero emission electric bikes), BevMo (on demand alcohol delivery), and healthy grocery stores like WholeFoods. Adding TripAdvisor to this list allows them to expand their reach from local community residents to travelers who are only on location for a day or two.
The TripAdvisor and DoorDash partnership is one of those hidden obvious partnerships. Clearly, they both benefit from each other because they both provide value to the same customer in different ways. The only issue I see here is this: Priceline Group (TripAdvisor’s parent company) acquired OpenTable (a restaurant reservation platform) in 2014. Their partnership with DoorDash will make it more convenient for people to stay in rather than go out to dinner and thus there is inherent conflict.
Luckily, people tend to want to do something and then find a way to do it rather than the other way around. So, for example, if someone is looking to go out to dinner- they likely wouldn’t be interested in the DoorDash offering and if someone wants to order quick takeout, they aren’t even considering going to a restaurant. So, realistically, they probably aren’t pulling too much traffic from their own business.
I think the partnership is smart and I love to see complimentary products and services working together to create a seamless efficient system for their users.
-Roamy
