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Discovery
A feed of real short-form video from real places, instead of a search box and a wall of stock photography.
Our story
How Super Reel Travel came about
Early 2024
A fashion app that worked like a feed
I was introduced to the team building Upstream, the world’s first music-inspired fashion app. The concept was simple: up-and-coming artists wore the clothes and posted about them on social media, and young people could search and scroll for those exact pieces through video.
A small monthly subscription meant an item would land on your doorstep each month, based on what you’d picked, and at the end of the month you’d send it back, or keep streaming, for something new.
The post
A question I could not answer
Are you still using Google to research your holiday? Why not use TikTok?
Around the same time, an old friend building a TikTok-powered listening service under his company, Shoeglebox, posted something on LinkedIn. It was aimed at no one in particular. It landed squarely on me.
The assumption
What I thought TikTok was
My picture of TikTok, until then, went no deeper than the ’80s Dance Challenge set to Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy, or the Ice Bucket Challenge. Dancing parents, viral moments, nothing more. I was far from right.
Tavira
Three days in southern Portugal
Prompted by his post, I searched three days in Tavira. What came back stopped me: nothing was bookable, but the sheer volume of content gave a far better sense of the place than any search engine ever had.
What to expect, and above all, the vast beaches and sandbanks along a quiet stretch of coast that I have since learned people call the Portuguese Maldives.
The idea
The lightbulb moment
Why has no one built a travel discovery app around video, to replace the search-box platforms that have barely changed in almost thirty years? Static images and dense text are no way to sell someone a dream experience. There had to be a better way to show it.
Today
And that is exactly what we built
Super Reel Travel exists to close the gap between searching for a holiday and actually seeing it, so people can experience their future trip before it happens, and every journey begins with anticipation.
