TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Spain-based ChangeYourFlight, a web platform to help travellers wishing to recuperate part of their money spent on unused non-refundable tickets.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
ChangeYourFlight is the first and only online platform to offer partial refunds to passengers with unused non-refundable tickets while driving fresh revenue for airlines.
We’re a small and passionate team with a wide range of backgrounds (engineering, finance, business and design) as well as nationalities (Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Italian).
Being frustrated of repeatedly having tickets going to waste, a solution had to be worked out.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
To launch the initial financing was mainly bootstrapped and supported by friends and family. Now we’re actively fundraising and plan on closing a Series A in a few months.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We are all faced with unforeseen events that lead us to change our travelling plans. As a passenger unless you pay for flexibility it’s bound to be hassle. In other words, the offering is a partial solution and doesn’t serve everyone.
In fact, about 7% of all non-refundable plane tickets end up never being used. This is called the "No-show phenomenon" and amounts to global annual losses of over 6,000 million euros for travelers and forces airlines to fly over 250,000 empty seats every day.
Describe the business, core products and services?
ChangeYourFlight is the first and only online platform to offer partial refunds to passengers with unused non-refundable tickets while driving fresh revenue for airlines.
In case of an unexpected event or change of plans, the passenger can access www.changeyourflight.com and request a partial refund on his ticket in a free and simple three-step process:
- Enter the booking details as one would do on the airline’s website.
- Choose the leg of the journey that will not be used.
- Set a desired refund amount, wait for the confirmation & receive a voucher for a next flight. At any time the user can always cancel or modify his request.
Changeyourflight aggregates and classifies the requests automatically making the information available for the airlines. When a request gets accepted the user gets a refund while the airline gets the extra available seat to sell, satisfying both passengers as well as the airlines.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
The service being free of charge for users, our customers are the airlines. In December 2010 we launched with AirOne, Alitalia’s Low-Cost subsidiary, so our current end-users are their passengers. That being said, we plan on integrating with other European carriers shortly.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Our first investors took the risk of supporting the project before signing any airline/customer.
They could relate to the issue at hand and grasp the potential of our solution.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
While the service is completely free of charge for passengers and end-users, airlines pay us a revenue share of the new ones created.
For a sole airline to handle their “no-show” passengers it is a niche market, but when carried out for multiple airlines the potential market size is huge.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Solid idea and business model.
- Qualified and driven team as well as advisors
Weaknesses:
- It’s never been done before
Opportunities:
- Huge potential market size
- Scalable platform
Threats:
- Industry conservatism and reticence to adopt inventions
- User misperception of the service
Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?Initially the idea was significantly different than the one as we know it today. A lot of people, including airline experts, laughed at our initial proposals. We DID listen to them and went back to the drawing board to craft a better product.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
A year from now we plan on serving about a thousand passengers per day by being eligible for airlines covering most of Europe.
Here is a clip:
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.