Company Profile: Travlrr video production platform that doesn’t cost the earth

Darren Khan, founder of Travlrr, is on a mission to get travel firms to ditch tired and cliched formats with his sustainable production platform that taps into local knowledge and talent

Darren Khan, founder of Travlrr, is on a mission to get travel firms to ditch tired and cliched formats with his sustainable production platform that taps into local knowledge and talent

For a sector that trades in such an inspiring and visual product, travel falls well short of other sectors when it comes to video and TV advertising.

That’s the view of Darren Khan, an experienced media sales executive and entrepreneur who founded sustainable remote production firm Travlrr in 2018.

Khan says too many travel commercials are reliant on cliched destination footage, and worse, are produced using traditional processes that are expensive and unsustainable.

Travlrr was established to meet the needs of modern digital travel businesses requiring content for multiple platforms that is authentic, creative and doesn’t cost the earth.

“If you take the traditional agency model you are paying for layers of people. We are removing all of that by dealing direct with the people making your content,” said Khan.

“This is a sustainable, remote production platform for the travel industry that puts you in contact with teams on the ground to create content faster and tap into cultural nuances.”

Travlrr has 1,000 local production teams in 110 countries worldwide ready to take its client’s briefs and create the video content they need.

Unlike open crowdsourcing platforms, Travlrr is private and works to match clients’ briefs with three in-destination production partners to pitch for the work.

“It’s all about quality, not quantity,” said Khan. “We want to tap into local knowledge about cities and regions and we don’t want people to travel for sustainability reasons.”

The Travlrr platform helps customers to manage the workflow processes throughout the project, including contracting, legalities and payments.

And it works with digital channels like Sky’s Adsmart, which allows greater targeting of customer types and geographies and Sky AdVance to enhance reach online.

Travllr works with a range of firms and organisations from national tourist boards, to OTAs like lastminute.com, Trivago and Expedia, and operators like Contiki and Olympic Holidays.

It also partners with industry bodies such as AdGreen and Green The Bid in the UK and US, works with Trees for Life on reforestation and has B Corporation status pending.

Khan sold half of the business last year to creative production and marketing solutions company Clickon, for which he is now chief commercial officer.

As well as local, agile production companies, Travlrr contracts 500 vetted influencer content creators for increasingly popular and powerful social media campaigns.

Khan said its analytics platform has access to first party data enabling it to better match these influencers to clients than just relying on publicly available data.

“We take the same approach as production,” he said, “we find these influencers, we vet them, and we interview them to make sure they are nice people to work with.

“We only work with influencers who allow us to properly verify their platform. We can pull out reems of data to make a better and closer match.

“We then pair influencers with one of our production teams to help them shoot films and with editing software.”

Khan says driving digital conversion and consideration is now a part of every brief Travlrr receives requiring different video formats for different channels.

Khan said: “Today you need to understand digital. And you need to create a lot of content and understand what the distribution is, where are you going to find these target people.

“You have to create the right content for the right people for the right channel. That sounds very obvious, but the travel industry does not seem to have grasped that yet.”