TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring Australia-based Rezdy, a reservation system provider for tours and activities.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
Rezdy is a tours and activities reservation system created by Simon Lenoir and Hugo Sterin. The idea behind the business was to focus on the tours and activities industry and create a unique online booking engine.
Both Simon and Hugo are IT professionals with a passion for travel. Simon has started and run a number of businesses including a dive centre in South East Asia.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
At the launch Rezdy has been bootstrapped. Currently the business is funded by a Sydney-based angel investor who also shares his travel industry experience with our team.
What problem are you trying to solve?
We have acknowledged the lack of cost efficient and explicit online booking software in the tours and activities segment when it was still a niche.
Developing an online reservation system in-house is a significant investment for small tours and activities operators, therefore they are forced to use booking engines designed to meet other purpose e.g. hotel room or appointment bookings.
Our aim is to deliver comprehensive software that suits exclusively the tours and activities sector.
We also understand that there is a huge demand on consolidating the industry’s data and opening it to the distribution. We aim to meet it by connecting small suppliers to the distributors’ network.
Describe the business, core products and services?
Rezdy is a software development company based in Sydney. We specialize in the leisure and tourism industry. We design tools that help tours and activities businesses manage the operations and increase income.
Our passion is to take care of the technical aspects required by any modern businesses. Our mission is to connect a large number of retailers to hundreds of local activity operators.
Our platform acts as a content aggregator that provides detailed booking information. Rezdy is a technology provider only. We do not resell our customers’ products: we provide the tools to do it.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
Our key customers are tours and activities operators that are looking for effective online booking solution. Unlike the other booking engines we specialise in tours and activities, exclusively.
We aim to streamline the operators’ management process and expand their online presence.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Managing a dive centre for over two years gave Simon a good insight into the travel industry.
Furthermore, we have conducted extensive market research supported by many surveys and questionnaires among our target audience. We have received a lot of positive feedback and encouragement.
Our customers demonstrate continued demand for our software and necessity of further developments.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
Rezdy offers very competitive and flexible pricing plans suitable for various tours and activities businesses.
Our pricing is designed to reflect needs of operators of all sizes, offering competitive prices for small operators and volume discounts, combined with additional features, for large operators.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Knowledge of the technology and travel industry helped us create a state-of–the-art solution. We believe our tours booking software will change the way customers plan their holidays.
Weaknesses:
- Due to limited resources we cannot implement our customer’s recommendations at the speed we wish to attain.
Opportunities:
- Developing affiliation with distribution partners and integration with the channel manager will enable small tours and activities operators to connect to all distributors simultaneously.
Threats:
- Increase of market entries with random solutions and strategies could lead to the loss of customer trust.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?Actually no one, we have had a 100% support, mostly because our solution will fill a technology gap in the industry.
We have had positive feedback and encouragement from our customers and investors that allowed us to grow and develop the comprehensive software.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
We aim to become a sole content aggregator for tour and activities in Asia-Pacific region.
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.