Booking Boss is entering a busy market with an integrated reservations system for tours, activities and attraction operators.
The company says it ensures real-time inventory and pricing, instant booking confirmation and analytics for customers.
It has also built a two way API that distributes the operator's inventory and pricing to other online channels.
The company was launched in 2013 by Renee Welsh (CEO) and Andy Welsh (CTO), a couple with 25 years experience between them in the travel industry, including 14 years for Renee holding senior management roles at Lastminute.com and Wotif Group.
Q&A with Renee below:
Tell us how you founded the company, why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business.
Throughout the course of our careers in tourism, we realised there was a gap in the market for a really powerful tour, activity and attraction management system; the lack of one hampered the industry as a whole.
It’s certainly not news that the travel activities industry is extremely fragmented, and very labour intensive. In any given day we are speaking to a sole trader who runs awesome walking tours through to large-scale attractions. The administrative overhead at every level is massive, and we’re dedicated to reducing that, one key process at a time.
After extensive research, including interviews with key stakeholders, we decided to develop a system that could give tour, activity and attraction operators the freedom to run and grow their business and consolidate all their requirements in one place and hence Booking Boss was born.
We’re not satisfied with being another layer that you have to manage, we solve the problem, we don’t compound it.
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
Booking Boss employs a total of nine people, including account managers, customer service, business development and software engineers.
Shane, our national business development manager is responsible for leading our sales and support functions.
Whilst the core of Booking Boss is a small team, we work in collaboration with our channel partners, agents and customers who really do a great job of spreading the word. They’re all key personnel, really.
Funding arrangements?
We were self-funded until June 2013 when we raised our first seed funding from angel investors.
Estimation of market size?
We estimate this sector is worth about $20 billion per year in Australia alone, with an estimated 18,000 businesses operating nationally, according to the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse.
PhoCusWright has conducted extensive studies on the travel activities category (as it is known) in both the USA and Europe; it suggests this sector is larger than Car Rental, Cruise and Package travel combined.
Booking Boss works with a large part of this market with a huge range of customers from multi-day tour operators, cooking classes and skydive operators, through to attractions.
Competition?
Due to the fact that Booking Boss consolidates a number of systems into one, there isn’t one competitor, a number of players overlap. Centaman is one of the companies we consistently get compared to; with our integrated POS and hardware extensions, we see this as a positive connection that’s been made at the top end of the market.
When it comes to the online booking system, Rezgo is the name we hear a lot of; they’re a venerable system that’s been around for a while. Their functionality works well in the online space for the medium-to-small end of the spectrum; they’ve also done a lot for the industry in establishing standards, so again it’s a favourable comparison for us.
With the above in mind, we believe there are no real direct competitors who offer a system that meets all the specific requirements of tourism operator’s. Booking Boss addresses all these in one place and we have yet to come across a system that can consolidate all of this like we do.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
Our revenue model is very straightforward. We believe in simple pricing models. There are no surprises and no complicated list of features that cost extra. We’ve added new features every month since our product was released and pricing has remained the same at $0.93 (AUD 1) per person – so each month you just get more value. We have a minimum $46.4 (AUD 50) per month, which includes unlimited staff accounts.
Our strategy for profitability is equally simple. We plan to continue positioning Booking Boss as the industry leader and specialist in business and channel management systems for tours, activities and attractions, and aim to manage everyone’s day out not just in Australia but worldwide.
What problem does the business solve?
Booking Boss alleviates a number of pain points, experienced when running a tour, activity or attraction operation, some of which include: Inventory management.
The use of spreadsheets and disparate systems in use by operators, each open to error and mass duplication of information, results in over booking and missed bookings, as they are not recorded accurately. A faulty vehicle, a rainy day can seriously affect a business and results in hours of administration.
Booking Boss streamlines this entire process from managing inventory in real time through to our integrated notification system enabling operators to reallocate and contact their customers at the click of the mouse. Access to real time availability – Guaranteed!
Consumers expect immediate confirmation when buying online, this has been a key frustration for a number of distribution channels as they struggle to encourage operators to log into their extranet to update their pricing and availability.
Booking Boss connects the industry by not only powering the operators entire business through to their own online checkout but also providing distribution channels access to real time availability by connecting to our 2way APIs. This is already in place with a number of channels across Australia and is growing rapidly. Our channel partners can now guarantee their availability, reduce the cost of their administration overheads and get access to an expanding product base simply and effectively.
Real time business intelligence is impossible, and often ignored. With more than 20 reports in Booking Boss, our customers gain massive insight into their business; what distributors are their greatest contributor to their bottom line; which sales channel is the most effective and has converted the most customers.
Booking Boss is 100% focused on transforming the travel activities industry; we don’t dilute our software or experience by trying to work within other categories such as hotels or villas.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
Booking Boss is centered around the idea of stickiness - how engrained can we make our software into our customers business.
In this industry, getting the bookings is only part of the time spent day to day. Organising the financials, information about customers, strategies, and fulfilling bookings are the things that really take up a person’s day. We want tomorrow to be better than today when you’re using Booking Boss.
There have been a few notable pivots; when we started out, we were dedicated to being the champion of the activity industry; however, as we made inroads to some of our larger customers - the National Zoo, Featherdale Wildlife Park - attractions of national note, we saw the lines between tours and attractions really blur; things started to pivot from there!
We’ve also pivoted our business model; originally we dabbled with offering tiered pricing and packages limiting functionality; this really rubbed us up the wrong way – we were adding barriers to growth for our customers, how true were we to our commitment to growing our customer’s business? The functionality is there, and it’s flexible enough to allow our customers to innovate their products, rather than be stuck in a box that says ‘you’re a walking tour’, ‘you’re a bus ticket’. This business is only just starting to build itself, so we want to give people the tools to innovate and see what really works for them, this aligns our goals and we can all succeed together.
Why should people or companies use the business?
If you are a company running on a paper diary, spreadsheets or multiple systems you are probably missing out on maximizing your revenue and Booking Boss is designed to help you overcome this.
Booking Boss lets businesses bring all the various operations required to book tours, activities and attractions into one place. It consolidates several systems: POS, ticketing, online checkout, reporting etc. so businesses can manage their operations more efficiently. It will also reduce administration costs, especially in terms of time whilst giving you the opportunity to increase bookings and generate additional revenue.
We also help to identify other revenue streams that our customers may not have considered or had readily available to them before. This works through our live channel manager that already connects into Adrenalin and Gifts That Thrill, and is soon to be live with Viator, Tourism Exchange Australia and a dozen others.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
Up until this point we have been in stealth mode, focusing solely on our software, customers and transforming this category. A large part of our growth has been through word of mouth and direct sales, which has been extremely effective for us and continues to be as we move out of stealth mode.
Testament to this is the fact that Booking Boss has been selected as an Innovator at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit in LA this November. Moving forward we have a holistic approach to raising awareness for both customers and channel partners.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
Our mission is to transform this industry sector, making everyone’s activities, tours and day out planning as easy and as accessible as possible, whether it’s a world away or right around the corner; we are going to be the industry benchmark for tours, activities and attractions.
The challenge in this is navigating the best path to allow us to continue to effectively support sole operators to major attractions.
This is just the beginning; our customers will want to move and innovate in ways that we can only really guess at this point in time which is why we have customer champions who work with us to shape the future.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
There has been an incredible amount of buzz within the travel activities sector as PhoCusWright studies shine a light on the opportunity. There has seen some incredible funding rounds for new aggregators/distributors such as Peek and GetYourGuide, which shows a great deal of commitment to the space, and the need for a good, independent source of high-quality data which Booking Boss provides.
Booking Boss goes a few steps further, providing an end-to-end software solution capable of transforming a business and providing real time data to owners and management. We are also the only cloud based software system that offers an integrated POS solution for entry ticketing, opening up an entirely new category to online distribution of attractions and the ability to sell ancillary products.
There are going to be many more startups other than Booking Boss who will identify other areas for improvement in this industry which is still very much evolving.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
We like to think we are part Salesforce, because they were the pioneers in SaaS CRM technology and have achieved a great deal spanning small business through to large scale enterprises; and part Google, as we believe it is crucial to understand data and process and seek to inspire and support a culture of innovation, fun and achievement.
Tnooz view
Though there are overlapping products (in terms of features) to Booking Boss, there is a growing need for such solutions in a tours, activities and attractions marketplace that is still fragmented (both a d challenge and an opportunity).
A recent PhoCusWright study about Europe's tours and activities market revealed a number of interesting data points: Offline channels still constitute a larger portion of bookings, use of technology by suppliers is low, and more importantly - suppliers think their own website as the most important channel. So, Booking Boss is on the right track.
European travellers spend up to $50 billion on activities, attractions, events and tours, according to PhoCusWright. Also, Booking Boss estimates the Australian tours and activities market to be worth $20 billion. So, on a global scale, one can imagine the overall potential of reservation system business for tours and activities market.
To embrace the trend of mobile bookings, Booking Boss has already made its reservation system mobile optimized.
Booking Boss's "extra revenue stream for customers" feature (for free) is interesting. For Booking Boss to stand out from the crowded marketplace, features like these and its wide distribution channels connectivity might be of much help.
Vine video of Booking Boss