Musement is a new tours and activities site and app that aims to help travelers book tickets to popular local attractions on demand or in advance.
This startup in Milan currently offers admission to see Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" after hours, tickets to permanent collections and temporary art exhibitions, and day tours, such as a bike tour of castles in Piedmont.
Its inventory, which it sources on its own, is mainly in Europe, though its aspirations are global.
As of today, it says it has 450 venues as partners, including Florence's Uffizi, the Vatican Museums, the Louvre in Paris, the Tower of London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
It has a curated selection of inventory, of easy choosing on a phone, rather than long lists of hundreds of suppliers.
The start-up is relatively well funded. It has raised $950,000 in seed money from 360 Capital Partners, IAG, and notable angels.
It says it has beta-tested its product with 20,000 users, which generated transactions with average value of $60.
In late March, it launched its free app for Apple devices for finding and booking admission to attractions, tours, and experiences wherever they are (starting with Europe). E-tickets are saved to your device or you can print them.
Musement's executive team has had senior experience at large companies. The CEO previously founded and ran a video-on-demand startup, for instance.
Advantage over competitors: we can include in our offer also venues with which we do not have commercial agreements, thanks to proprietary technology which allows non-negotiated integrations
Musement has created a Vine to illustrate its pitch:
Q&A with CEO Alessandro Petazzi:
Tell us how you founded the company. Why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business?
We started in 2013 with a focus on aggregating and selling tickets for permanent and temporary art exhibits, museums and attractions, then we realized that the market of travel activities and in-destination experiences was larger than that.
Our platform was already perfectly fit to also accommodate tours and other things to do and that the customer needs and target were very similar, so we decided to expand the scope.
Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?
Total team of 14: 4 co-founders (Fabio Zecchini, CTO + Claudio Bellinzona, Content & Operations + Paolo Giulini, Offer and Business Development + myself as CEO), 4 developers, 3 web editors, 2 marketing and “growth hacking” (even if I don’t particularly like the term…), 1 customer care.
In terms of our past experiences, all of us co-founders have worked at large companies.
I was the managing director of Fastweb Video on Demand (VOD), a competitor of Netflix. I also founded the consultancy ON CUBED.
Among our co-founders, Fabio has been working as Chief Data Officer for various companies, optimizing traffic acquisition costs. So we are luckily quite efficient at that.
The other three founders were already working at their own companies.
Funding arrangements?
We raised a first seed round of 690,000 EUR last September from 360 Capital Partners, an angel network that has already IPO-ed two of its companies.
We will do a new round in the next few months.
Estimation of market size?
The travel activities market is worth approximately 37B EUR (according to PhoCusWright) if we only consider European travelers, who are currently the majority of our customers.
The base then becomes close to 100 billion euro if we consider all travelers worldwide. Ticketing for museums and art exhibits alone is obviously a much smaller market, around 3 billion euro globally.
Competition?
The usual suspects in the travel activities world: Viator, City Discovery, Ceetiz, Isango, Peek and GetYourGuide -- among other specialist players.
Our approach is not identical to any of them (obviously!), given our curated and mobile-first approach. But at the end we are effectively competing for the attention and money of similar people in similar situations.
Revenue model and strategy for profitability?
It’s quite simple: we sell tickets, guided tours, audio guides to consumers either directly B2C on our website/app or indirectly via B2B2C agreements.
We get a commission (normally ranging between 15% and 25% of the face value of what we sell).
We are currently considering various possible new revenue streams, such as:
1. B2C: E-commerce on merchandising and books related to the museums, venues and art exhibitions we partner with
2. B2B: Direct ticket provisioning services (online and offline) to venues, attractions and activity organizers who do not yet have modern ticketing platforms in place
Right now, #1 and #2 are not yet active revenue streams and 100% of our margins are based on agency commissions.
What problem does the business solve?
When travelers visit a new place, they might know what they should see/visit/experience, but normally they don't know how to have a more meaningful experience.
They ask themselves questions like, who can provide a guided tour? How do I get an audioguide or other relevant media to improve my understanding of what I am seeing? Or even how/where to get tickets to attractions?
We solve these issues by providing all of the info on tickets, guided tours, and experiences around the relevant sites/venues/attractions of any given city in a one-stop-shop.
Moreover, most of the time people only know the "must see" sites and miss a lot of hidden gems.
Based on what they search on our platform, we can suggest other places/experiences which can be relevant for them, thus improving their overall visiting experience.
How did the initial idea evolve and were there changes/any pivots along the way in the early stages?
The original idea simply emerged when I was queuing up in front of an art exhibit in Florence with one of my co-founders and could not find a way to skip the line with an app.
Later that day we had a chat with another co-founder, who at the time was organizing art exhibitions. He then introduced us to the subtle complexities of that niche of activities.
In time, we realized that the marketplace model “Airbnb for travel activities” -- if taken to the extreme -- wouldn't work.
Yes, I want to have 20,000 houses listed in Rome because I have different tastes from anyone else when it comes to accommodations and yes, I want to see lots of activities on a site so I can choose.
But rather than having 300 tours offered by different guides all for the Vatican Museums I would like to see 300 tours/access to hidden gems I can’t find elsewhere and 3-4 tours of the Vatican museums editorially curated.
(Reviews are a good proxy of quality, but are still not perfect).
We are trying to strike a balance. We aim to build "breadth of offer" by aggregating the must-haves with lots of other “attractions” rather than only different providers for the same attractions. Obviously, we must also have the usual suspects onboard.
Why should people or companies use the business?
The ultimate goal for Musement is to provide tailor-made suggestions and access to experiences in every language and every country around the world.
In the cities in which we have completed our roll-out, Venice for example, we have the most complete offer -- in terms of access not only to top-selling activities and tours but also to temporary events, which also cater to a local audience, and long-tail attractions and “hidden gems”.
Most of our competitors believe that a more complete offer equals a larger number of activities on sale.
We believe that it is useless and actually counter-productive to have 300 different tours of the Vatican museums provided by 300 different suppliers of uneven quality.
In our view, “more complete” equals a curated selection of the best tours by the best suppliers for the top attractions, plus access and activities around hidden gems, plus access to temporary events, plus some exclusives (activities and tours on sale exclusively on our platform).
Our experience in the Video on Demand space has clearly shown us that more movies on the platform rarely translated into more sales and happier customers without a carefully curated approach – quite the opposite actually.
What is the strategy for raising awareness and the customer/user acquisition?
Right now we are not yet pushing to communicate our brand directly but rather to communicate our brand through the services we offer and our product portfolio.
In other words, the majority of our marketing budget is devoted to promoting the activities we have on sale, by intercepting customers who already in a mood close to a purchasing decision.
To put it bluntly, at its essence ours is an e-commerce business in which our customer acquisition cost must be lower that its lifetime value and we are working to achieve that goal, which is apparently closer than we expected.
There are still many countries that are not yet well served by the first names you would think of in this space, there are still lots of landgrab opportunities.
Where do you see the company in three years time and what specific challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?
We can realistically become one of the 3 top brands for Travel Activities worldwide, a segment of the Travel sector which has not yet migrated online in the same proportions that Flights and Accommodations has.
The significant players in the space have relevant tractions only in the US/UK, Germany and France – there is lots of space to grow in Southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
The biggest roadblock is efficient distribution.
Right now our customer acquisition cost across all channels (adwords, social, affiliation, direct B2B deals) is higher than the margin generated on a single transaction and we do not yet have enough history to meaningfully estimate customer lifetime value.
If we are not able to either reduce customer acquisition costs or to increase margins per transaction or transactions during a customer lifetime, we would not be able to pay back our capital.
On the other hand we are already proving efficient in scaling our offer portfolio so we are definitely less worried by that. It is more about efficiently connecting demand then it is about efficiently sourcing supply.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
Well, by its own nature the travel activities space must be local and therefore it is naturally fragmented, which has not created the right incentives for the majority of players (be them activity organizers or attraction managers), save the largest, to build the technological infrastructure to efficiently manage what they offer.
By aggregating them globally we can be much more efficient at that and transfer part of that efficiency to our suppliers and part to our customers, so that at the end it’s win-win.
What other technology company would you consider yourselves most closely aligned to in terms of culture and style... and why?
Frankly we have not done a lot of “cultural benchmarking” and being based in a city, Milan, which is not exactly like San Francisco in terms of startup density doesn’t help.
However my gut feeling is that we have managed to mix the culture of a “typical” startup (very flat, open, with every team member contributing their ideas for the business) with a structured approach to budgeting and monitoring results which is probably more typical of the larger organizations we all worked at in the past.
Tnooz view:
Musement's model is interesting interesting in a few ways.
It has one aspect of the buzzed-about GetYourGuide approach, in that it serves as a marketplace on which all supplier upload their content.
But it adds in more content curation, which enables easier searching and decision-making on a mobile device for travelers on the go -- similar to Hotel Tonight's deliberately limited selection in its early days.
That can help build rapport on the supplier side, because suppliers are more likely to notice referrals if they're in a larger volume.
Museument's proprietary scraping/bot platform is reminiscent of Swiss search engine Bravofly and online travel agency Rumbo.
The bot holds the promise of letting it integrate partners who do not want to have direct commercial deals with it (or with anyone else), like some museums in Berlin, for example.
Tours and activities is a much-discussed area -- Tnooz has had in-depth coverage -- but it still faces many roadblocks.
There are some challenges ahead. Many tour and activities companies are overwhelmed by the extranets they have to deal with across the industry.
Plus, the idea of any supplier or distributor being able to sell and validate a ticket just hasn't become a global standard.
There's also been continued interest in the sector from bigger players, such as Expedia and possibly Foursquare, who have already accumulated vast databases of consumers.
So it's an open question if the newbies of tours and activities sweep aside the old kids on the block.
That said, Museument is the most promising Italian travel startup we've seen since Wanderio. We say to it, "In bocca al lupo."