In brief: Stride bags US$2.5M from JetBlue, NFX for its guided trips marketplace

Stride describes itself as a marketplace for experiential multi-day and multi-destination packaged trips planned by experts.
The service, which was co-founded by former Starwood Hotels and Viator executive Gavin Delany, today announced that it has raised a US$2.5 million seed funding from JetBlue Ventures and NFX.
In addition, it rolled out its new TripFinder feature, which makes it easier to find the right tour from over 30,000 travel itineraries from its partners in its database.
The company plans to use the new funding to build out its platform and expand the range of tours in its lineup to cover even more places.
TripFinder makes it far easier to find the right tour by guiding you through a few questions about who you are, where you want to travel and what style of travel you are interested in, including how much free time you expect to have during your guided experience.
Stride doesn’t expect that any of the larger travel sites like TripAdvisor or Expedia will really cut into its market anytime soon.
Guided tours are a relatively small market for these companies, compared to the trillion-dollar flight and hotel booking market.
In addition, these multi-day and multi-destination tours are simply far more complex than commodity flight and hotel bookings.