Not Your Average Bottom of the Baryl Traveling Experience
Author: Abagail Yuhan
Photographer: Joanna Ma
When it comes to planning trips to new places or even figuring out what to do in your own city, many people spend hours upon hours researching activities to do, places to eat, and things to see. Some people will find travel companies to help them plan, but even with them, the process is almost never easy or fast. University of Chicago fourth years, Alex Pu and Yuyang Zhang, have started their own company to help travelers explore their city/the city of their choice without any stress. Baryl is a travel startup that creates “personalized itineraries at the click of a button.” Their goal is to move the travel industry into the 21st century by making it more technologically advanced, fast, and easy. And Baryl understands that food especially, is intertwined with travel. In order to gain a better understanding of Baryl and its relationship with food, I sat down with the Alex and Yuyang to ask them about themselves, their company, and their mission.
Tell me a little bit about yourselves.
Pu: My name is Alex Pu. I’m a 4th-year in the College, studying business economics. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia. I’m in Hyde Park now, enjoying my last year of school, and I really like startups and food.
Zhang: I’m Yuyang, and I’m also a 4th-year. I’m double majoring in Psychology and Business Economics, and I’m from Beijing. Obviously as co-founders of Baryl, we love traveling and food, and me especially, I’m a big international traveller, which is a big reason I decided to work on Baryl.
What is Baryl?
Pu: Baryl is a travel startup, and we help travelers create personalized itineraries when they travel. So a large focus of what we do is helping people figure out places they want to eat when they travel and things that they want to do. Based on their preferences we are able to create a very hyper personalized experience.
Zhang: And at the same time, Baryl specializes in activity and food at your destination. We have our own proprietary database which is composed of a lot of data points and recommendations that are more niche, so not just things that you are going to find on Yelp or TripAdvisor.
Why did you start Baryl? What’s your mission?
Pu: We started Baryl because we’re problem-solvers. What we came to realize is that when we went to plan trips, as much as we love traveling, the planning part isn’t always the most fun . Even in the last 15 years, not much has changed on the customer’s side. It still takes people, on average, 10+ hours to plan a trip. With as much as society and technology has progressed, we believed that there had to be a better way. That’s what we wanted to solve: being able to plan trips at the click of a button and take that 10 hour planning process into something that looks more like 5 or 10 minutes.
Zhang: We love good food places, and we love good recommendations. We especially value places that are personalized based on our preferences. This whole personalization trend is very important for our generation and the younger demographic.
Where do you see your company down the line? How do you plan on growing it?
Zhang: Right now we are definitely still relatively early on. Immediate goal going forward is launching our product, which is this cool tool that everyone can use, and ultimately, an app. We really want to push it out in the market so that anyone can use it.
Pu: Down the line, we hope that Baryl becomes a household name, and that it becomes the go-to travel-planning tool people think of the moment they decide to travel. We think there’s a lot of space for change here because the travel industry has been very stagnant, and we want to be the ones to push it forward.
Zhang: And especially right after Covid, a lot of people are rethinking how they travel, and are looking to travel again. This is a good time to introduce a new way of planning that people can adopt.
How does food fit into your mission for your company?
Pu: We are all huge foodies. I think most people consider themselves foodies even though there are different degrees of it. People like fine-dining, discovering niche hole-in-the-wall places, and eating local foods. If you look at our Instagram, Eric (social media manager) is hard at work, trying every restaurant in Chicago, bringing his friends, and sharing that with our community. Even though we have this larger mission, in our immediate community with the students around us, we see us bringing them value.
Zhang: And at the same time, food and travel are so intertwined. A lot of people travel for food. Whether it is local cuisine or street food, food is a very big part of traveling, so it inevitably ties into the core of what Baryl does.
Just for fun, what are your personal favorite foods or any food recommendations you have?
Zhang: In terms of Chicago restaurants, Café Ba-Ba-Reeba in Lincoln Park is my favorite. But, in terms of actual favorite food in terms of one thing you could make me eat for the rest of my life, it would probably be classic tomatoes and eggs because that’s just home.
Pu: Something I discovered recently is Tsukemen ramen, which is essentially dipping ramen. Every time I’d seen it online, I thought it was stupid, but I had it at this one place in Atlanta, and it was probably the best ramen I ever had. Absolutely blew my mind, and I think about that a lot.
After sitting down with Baryl in an interview, they offered to send me and Joanna on our own personalized adventure to Pilsen, Chicago. Alex, Yuyang, and Eric personalized the half-day trip to our interests, food preferences, money, and time after a 5-10 minute meeting with them. They created a timed itinerary for our day that required us to do absolutely zero work or research.
We essentially went on a walking tour of Pilsen that involved a plethora of food. The carnitas at “Don Pedro” were super tender, flavorful, and cheap. “Birreria Reyes” had mouth-watering “birria de res” or “de chivo” (beef or goat), and you get so much bang for your buck. “La Michoacana Premium” is a large, bright pink ice cream shop. Joanna and I tried their popsicles, and my cucumber popsicle was unique and refreshing. Across the street, we got tamales from “La Casa del Pueblo” that were soft, warm, and delicious. Next, we went to the National Museum of Mexican Art, and on the way we stopped and saw famous murals above a laundromat. The museum had many unique installations including a Día de Los Muertos exhibit, which included pieces from artists on both sides of the US-Mexican border. Then, we visited one of the most iconic aspects of Pilsen: the Pilsen murals. The murals go on for blocks and feature humongous images that range from political messages to cartoons, in many different artists’ styles. Finally, we ended our trip with a hot drink from Café Jumping Bean, a very busy, homey coffee shop in the center of Pilsen. The café has a lot of unique drinks, so I tried their Mocha Almond Latte, which definitely hit the spot after a lot of walking on a chilly day.
Walking around Pilsen on the route that Baryl gave us, we were able to immerse ourselves into the experience of exploring a new town. I was able to explore an area of Chicago that I’ve been wanting to see for so long without any stress. As someone who has never used travel advisors or companies because of my distrust in the people who run travel companies to find what’s best for me, I found Baryl’s process extremely specialized and eye-opening. Because of Baryl’s prioritization of food and personalization, the whole process was enjoyable and unparalleled to any experience I had before when travelling or exploring somewhere new.
Follow Baryl on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/_u/baryltrips
Visit Baryl’s website
https://www.baryl.io/
*the transcript of this interview has been edited for the purposes of clarity