Grace McBride, Lucia founder and CEO.
Mendoza MBA graduate Grace McBride is changing how luxury travel works with a new itinerary platform and marketplace. McBride the founder and CEO of Lucia, a travel planning platform that is specifically designed for high-end travel advisors, hotels and concierge services. Lucia is the first of its kind made specifically for the luxury travel industry.
The university-supported startup was founded in May 2021, as a solution to a problem she found within her first company, TripKit, an easier and more efficient way to create travel itineraries for travel advisors and their clients. Currently, McBride is in the midst of raising a $1,000,000 pre-seed round that will allow her to grow the newly launched platform.
A concierge marketplace, high-touch itinerary technology and other design attributes help showcase the emotional and exciting part of travel planning. “Lucia not only focuses on design but also the ease of use for the travel advisor on the back end”, says McBride. As of now, travel advisors use PDF formatted options to send trip details to clients. This format tends to be very content heavy and makes it challenging to get travelers excited about their trip and enjoy the travel planning process. This is very effective for the advisor or client.
Lucia has finished beta testing and released their full platform. They will formally launch their app towards the end of the summer, at which time travel advisors will pay a monthly subscription of $49 for the itinerary feature or $9.99 for access to the concierge marketplace.
The next step is for the Lucia team to focus on tech enhancements, key partnerships and agency contracts as it grows over the next few months.
McBride graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s of science in communication in 2019 and she just received her masters in business administration from the Mendoza College of Business Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Lucia is one of the IDEA Center’s “high potential startups.” High potential startups are companies that are more likely to scale and grow quickly compared to other companies.