My Purpose

To change the travel user experience through product-driven innovation.

I have travelled to over 300 cities in my life. During a 1-year backpacking trip in 2016, I started to think deeper about something that had been crossing my mind for years.

“Why is travel planning so difficult?”
“Why do I need to waste time stressing when travel should be about having fun?”
“How many people are just like me: spending countless hours checking thousands of blogs and websites to research and plan a simple trip?”

I love to travel but hate planning for it. I have very strong preferences, so it takes me time and effort to create an ideal itinerary that satisfies my needs.

On the other side, there are people who give up on travelling altogether since planning is such a burden. Then there are those who simply take package holiday, but often end up visiting places that don’t suit their own interests.

I feel that the user experience for travel planning has a lot of room for improvement. There is very little being done in the marketplace to directly address solving these user experience issues. After careful thought, I decided that if no one is fixing these issues for me, I’ll need to do it myself.

It is said that the travel industry is the Red Ocean, that it will continue to grow. However, I did not decide to create this service because of the market opportunity. As a traveller myself and therefore a user, it became clear to me that the industry requires something new, so I decided I needed to step in.

The service I aim to achieve is different to those that were created to match the market. Born from my own experiences from travelling, I am creating a brand new service that I want to use but didn’t exist when I was travelling. A strong product-driven travel service is what I plan to achieve.

I truly believe this service will drastically add value to the travel planning user experience for travellers around the world, regardless of your preferences, where you are travelling from, where to, or for how long.

Within the next 5 years, I will make this service the most used, most helpful personal travel service available globally.


Profile

Representative Director　CEO　　　Takayoshi Haraguchi

After graduating from Tokyo Institute of Technology Graduate School, Takayoshi joined Accenture Strategy Group for 8 years (including a 1-year sabbatical). Later, after undertaking a COO position with a drone start-up company, he founded 8xplorer Inc. in March 2018.

From his own personal experiences of traveling around the world, he felt that “In the current marketplace, the user experience for travel planning individuals is not optimized to match their thought process and behavior, nor does it utilize the latest technology. If no one in the world is challenging this, this is something I need to do for the world. “

He is an entrepreneur, a photographer, an explorer, and an ‘earth hacker’. As a photographer, he produces and sells 300 to 500 calendars each year using his own photography from his travels. As an explorer, he has visited over 300 cities in 68 countries all around the world, including those in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

He often travels to unexplored and secluded places and prefers tightly-scheduled and well-planned trips. His most memorable travel experiences were in Socotra Island, the Antarctica and Aconcagua climb.

His Motto is “Now or Never”