Russian-based travel and tourism marketplace Tripster connects worldwide travelers with private tour guides in 74 different countries and 343 cities. Tripster’s expert tour guides consist of local Russian-speaking historians, architects, journalists and other experts who are extremely enthusiastic, sociable and knowledgeable about the history, architecture, culture, sightseeing, local cuisine, unusual routes, bars and nightlife in their respective cities.

Sending real-time communications to users is essential for Tripster. SMS alerts notify tour guides of new bookings, cancellations, or new traveler conversations. Important traveler notifications include order confirmations, tour cancellations and new tour guide conversations. The ability to communicate directly with tour guides and travelers has helped Tripster increase user engagement, satisfaction rates and maintain a constant connection with their clients.

Tripster had been experiencing issues that were impacting their business and the overall customer experience with their brand. Tripster’s existing SMS messaging service had repeated quality problems, message failures and cases where messages never reached intended recipients. Tripster had a goal of improving SMS delivery rates to ensure important messages would reach their tour guides and travelers. Tripster was looking for a new SMS solution that offered broader worldwide coverage to expand their reach to more countries. As with any business, continued improvements to overall costs and support services was important too. Tripster wanted to work with a vendor who was more client-oriented; a technology partner.

Tripster chose TeleSign as their new technology partner for several reasons. TeleSign is a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) with hundreds of direct carrier connections, maintains market leading delivery speed and completion rates and offered broader international coverage. Tripster easily and quickly integrated TeleSign’s SMS messaging API within a day, making the upgrade seamless for their development team. Tripster also liked the fact that TeleSign was more client-oriented and offered direct access to sales and support teams for no additional charge (most other providers charge a fee of $500 to $5k per month).

Improved SMS delivery rates by 10% to 12% in most markets

Tripster improved delivery rates of their SMS alerts and notifications by 10% or more

The result was more of their messages reaching intended recipients. TeleSign’s waterfall failover system dynamically routes a message to a secondary provider in the event delivery fails over the first provider and advanced phone number cleansing is utilized to properly reformat phone numbers with incorrectly placed international dialing codes. Both features helped ensure better SMS delivery rates for Tripster.

Expanded reach to more countries using higher-quality global network

Using TeleSign, Tripster could expand their reach to tour guides and travelers in more countries. Tripster’s SMS notifications are now being successfully delivered in all currently targeted countries and in their preferred language, Russian. TeleSign’s global network and higher-quality, direct-to-carrier routes provide access to over 200 countries and in 87 different languages, which will help Tripster with global expansion options.

Gained access to premium support and an assigned TeleSign Account Manager

TeleSign worked very closely with Tripster to understand their business needs and expectations. With TeleSign, Tripster gained access to free “premium” support plus personalized client-oriented services including an assigned Account Manager, access to 24/7 email and phone support, integration assistance, best practice guidance, compliance assistance, routing experts and knowledge engineers. Their previous solution did not provide this.