By Colin Young, News Staff
Two Northeastern students took advantage of their common love of traveling and living abroad to launch SANEtraveler.com earlier this month, a website dedicated to helping other students make the most of their time abroad.
Seniors Nora Drago and Stephanie Filipek officially launched their website Sept. 1. SANEtraveler.com, which comes from the phrase “Study Abroad Naked and Exposed,” provides user-contributed reviews of restaurants, hostels, bars and hangouts that are a bit off the beaten path in hopes of giving students a less “touristy” experience abroad.
“When you’re abroad, you’re there for four months and you aren’t a tourist. If you were to come to Boston most websites would tell you to go to the Prudential Center, not that lots of college kids hang out at the Espresso Royale Caffé,” said Drago, a business major with a focus in Management Information Systems (MIS) and entrepreneurship, and SANEtraveler.com’s chief marketing officer. “We want to let people know about the awesome places like that around the world.”
On the website, users can search locations on six continents by country and then city. For each city (67 at press time), users can browse reviews of locations that other students have visited in categories such as ‘grub,’ ‘nightlife’ and ‘hotels/hostels.’ Eventually, a message board feature will allow users to engage in dialogue about the places they have visited.
For now, Drago and Filipek said they are targeting Northeastern students, but Drago said she would like to see the site develop into an extensive tool for young people around the world to get information about cities abroad.
“In terms of the future, we are looking to capitalize on Northeastern students and other Boston schools and going from there,” Drago said. “Ultimately, we hope that all students planning on going abroad use SANE and can use it as a one-stop shop. My biggest hope is that it becomes a great tool for the community.”
Drago and Filipek met through a mutual friend in January 2009 and got to discussing their experiences in foreign countries, and their feelings that they had missed out on opportunities and decided to do something to assist others in similar situations.
“We both felt that we needed something like this because we spent money we didn’t have to and missed out on other things. It definitely would have helped,” Drago said.
The business grew from a few screenshots and a name to what it is now, a functional website run by a team of about eight people. Drago and Filipek used what they learned in their classes, Northeastern’s student-run Inter-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship Accelerator (IDEA) – a program that assists students in their start-up ideas – and help from a few professors to turn their concept into an actuality.
The women said College of Business Administration professor Michael Zack was particularly helpful.
“My conversations [with Drago and Filipek] started very general, but we got into how to make it into a real business. How do you get from an idea to something that you can actually turn into a viable, ongoing business,” Zack said. “One of the hardest things is to go from an idea to being real, that’s one of the biggest humps to get over.”
Drago said the path towards SANEtraveler.com’s launch began with outreach to students in the Boston area and finding a team of people to help create and run the website. Once a beta site was up, the SANEtraveler.com team considered all of the feedback they had received and formally launched the website.
“We knew we could make it work because we knew that it was something that was needed,” Drago said. “Now, we want to try to build the buzz about the site and hope it takes off. We have short- and intermediate-term goals, with our long-term hope being that SANEtraveler.com becomes the one stop shop for students going abroad.”
One of the next steps is to partner with other travel websites and travel related businesses to create revenue that will help maintain and expand the website, Drago said.
“It is now beyond the stage of being an idea, being a prototype. It’s actually real. I think they’re now committed to the point where something could happen for them,” Zack said.
Senior International Co-op Counselor Lilly Chryssis said SANEtraveler.com could be a valuable resource for those planning on spending long periods of time overseas.
“The website seems like it could be a very helpful tool for students who are abroad and are looking to do things more off the beaten path,” Chryssis said.
Drago said the practice of turning an idea into a real business has been the greatest form of experiential learning.
“I have learned more running SANEtraveler.com than I ever could have in the classroom,” Drago said. “I would tell anyone looking to start their own business to do it while in school. If you fail, it is still such a valuable learning experience.”
