After working long hours in the corporate world followed by long hours online trying to plan independent holidays, Secret Earth's founders decided to find a better way.
At the time, and still today, there were hundreds of websites for booking travel, but few, if any, helped you research and plan trips particularly when it came to inspiration.
The overwhelming information and advice available was mostly poor quality and badly presented.
Secret Earth decided that to plan an independent holiday, travellers need: quality recommendations, a way to plan trips together and an easy means to book them.
A core team of founders Matthew Roach and John Kat, editorial director James Alexander and non-executive director Katherine Gershon (formally a director for Thomas Cook), is supported by a network of more than 40 writers for writing and freelance editing.
To date the startup is privately funded but says it is likely to seek an additional round of funding later in 2014.
The newcomer's target market is time-poor professionals earning £30,000+, who want to have quality holidays.
The other major target market is retirees, which have time and money and want to tick off the world’s greatest travel experiences (while they still can).
Secret Earth plans to target the UK initially, notably London and build from there as it also has strong coverage in Europe.
The company believes its difference lies in there being no website offering the combination of researching, planning and booking of independent travel. It also points to its trip-planning calendar as a unique element.
That said, there is competition from many corners including TripAdvisor as it moves towards planning functionality, online travel sections of newspapers which, it says, don't offer the planning element and booking is through a single preferred supplier and Scandinavia site stay.com which enables users to build a guide to take with them.
It also mentions quality selective hotel recommendation sites such as mrandmrsmith and i-escape as competitors for its target audience while metasearch services Trivago and Kayak are competitors for price comparison and hotel bookings.
Secret Earth is targeting several revenue streams:
- Affiliate booking commissions for hotels and attractions
- Sponsored listings by travel suppliers to encourage direct bookings
- Other revenue streams are under development linked to new functionality planned for launch later this year
What problem does the business solve?
Planning independent holidays currently requires disparate sources. It can take days, even weeks, – time that many people don't have or don’t want to commit and it is a frustrating process.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there any changes/pivots along the way in the early stages?
There have been no pivots, and the original business idea for Secret Earth has held true for three years now.
We have, however, evolved and improved, and we have identified new revenue streams and new target markets (both demographic and geographic).
Why should people or companies use the businesss?
Aside from stated goal of helping you plan great holidays quickly, Secret Earth is an inspiring and enjoyable user experience that informs our members of travel experiences they never knew of or even imagined. We invested significant time and resources to pinpoint the world’s greatest travel experiences, working with the very best travel writers as experts who can review them.
As a result, the website now showcases our incredible planet and the amazing things you can do on it. Many travel sites are frustrating to use because users can’t find what they are looking for, we have spent a lot of time organising our data architecture making it as easy as possible for members to quickly find what they are looking for, or get relevant inspiration if they are looking for ideas.
Being new to market we have taken advantage of the very latest technology to present what we hope is receive as a slick and professional website which is incredibly easy to use on mobile, tablet and desktop.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition (apart from PR)?
The Secret Earth website is initially being launched as an invitation only website, with 5,000 founding members. This is to create buzz and excitement about a ‘secret’ new find, and to ride a first wave of invitations by friends and family.
Invitations provide a strong call to action to recipients in the crowded world of online travel, and help to reach the significant percentage of the population that are not active on social media. Members who get three others to sign up are rewarded with access to extra high value tips and recommendations, known as Insider.
We expect that the membership requirement will be relaxed to allow anyone to access the site once the first wave has passed, though a sign up will always be required to use the planning tools that need an ID to be created.
The website is SEO optimized, and with its significant amounts of original content should rank well on google and other search engines. This will be supplemented by a targeted SEM marketing strategy.
We will be actively posting on social media channels and developing Pinterest boards that feature our outstanding photography.
We are also discussing partnerships with several major brands, which can bring their existing customer base to our service, benefit from our product and experience, and share the revenue.
Where do you see yourselves in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
In three years time, we hope to be the first place for time-poor professionals and retirees to go when starting to plan an independent holiday.
We expect our content to be globally comprehensive (as opposed to Europe-centric right now), with extra local content for major cities like New York and Hong Kong (as we have for London right now).
We’ll have created a marketplace, where tour operators can competitively quote on our members’ itineraries bringing new demand to suppliers. This would be a groundbreaking development in the industry.
We see personalised recommendations featuring heavily in both our newsletters, and content presentation, based on user profiles we can build from their site usage patterns. E.g. what they like to do, when they like booking etc.
There are no technical challenges we foresee in delivering the above. We have invested significant time and resources in putting a sound infrastructure in place that meets our future development needs – notably our data model. Our greatest challenge will be to build a sufficient user base to make the business sustainable.
An important, everyday challenge is keeping the content up to date, for which we have designed special procedures and testing to automate this as much as possible.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Significant developments have occurred in the online ‘beach holiday’ part of the industry. However to date very few commercial start-ups have focused on the non-budget, independent traveller who wants to plan a complex itinerary on their own.
Most independent travel sites either focus exclusively on content and inspiration, with no planning or limited booking tools; or are just booking sites with limited inspiration and no planning tools.
The rise of social media and user generated content websites has seen vast volumes of poor quality information generated, requiring substantial time to read and review – which an increasingly time-poor population does not have. The professional content sources e.g. newspapers, have legacy systems and content designed for print rather than an online presentation.
As a result, their content is generally ‘inaccessible’ (text heavy, difficult to search and filter), and their websites ill-suited to planning.
The opportunities for independent travel are greater than ever as globalization has taken hold, and this segment require a reputable resource they can use to plan their trips – which in our opinion does not yet exist.
We also know for a fact that numerous major travel industry players have tried and failed to deliver the itinerary planning tool that we have delivered (due, we think, to the need for a sound data architecture behind the scenes that makes it work; data architecture is the specialty of one of our founders, John).
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style...and why?
Apple in the early days – innovative and flexible. Like Apple we are obsessed with making our customer/members lives easier and more beautiful.
Tnooz view:
Secret Earth has a nice look and feel about it as well as a number of things going for it at this early stage.
It is hedging its bets across a number of potential revenue streams including affiliates, sponsored listings and partnerships. This is wise given the amount of competition out there, perhaps not combining the three research (+inspiration), plan and book elements but definitely claiming to bring order to the the trip planning chaos.
Going after a defined target market - retired people - is a good idea although not so certain is the time-poor element, isn't that just about everyone these days?
The quality end of the market is interesting - what's to stop Expedia creating a luxury tab or mrandmrssmith from adding a flight button?
Having said that the luxury segment has been growing in the past couple of years so perhaps there's room for one more.
Facebook is another potential threat - the social network has revealed big plans to go after travel this year so watch this space.
The early stage idea of invitees only is a cool way to create a buzz if it has the desired effect but the building of a big enough user base to carry the business forward must be a constant niggle in the back of the team's mind.
Will all these things be enough for Secret Earth to gain traction as 2014 progresses?
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