Make It Social has signed a deal with Skiworld enabling groups of friends to book together but pay separately.
The Scotland-based company, which launched in 2014, went back to basics recently to focus on the checkout experience, which it sees as the main challenge to group booking.
Founder Eddie Rob admits mistakes were made in the early days with the company “over-egging the product.”
“We had a Frankenstein of a product with every feature built into it.”
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He describes the online booking experience as “built by the baby boomer generation for the boomer generation.”
“We now have this socially connected generation and we’re forcing them to go on to this world where one man pays, which is a backwards step when you look at all the technology and innovation we have had.”
Robb says there are two types of checkout - the product checkout as with Amazon and the experience checkout.
“It’s a one-to-one booking experience for what is more often than not a one-to-many offline experience, so that’s where we decided to focus our efforts.”
Make It Social has spent time honing this element for group booking as well as signing deals in the ticketing segment with players such as Ambassador Theatre Group and Ticketmaster.
“We wanted to figure out, Where is there high volume of bookings or people going with friends? And landed on the ticketing space. What that allowed us to do was really hone our user experience and solve the problem of buying a bunch of tickets with multiple friends.”
The technology can be white-labelled and embedded within a travel company's website and customers select the "make it social" or group booking button and invite friends.
Robb says the technology “de-risks” the process for groups of friends through a pre-authorization of payment of the leader and spaces held for everyone else.
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The invitees receive a personal invite, which Robb says has a 75% invite-to-book success rate. Invitees then pre-authorize their card, and the leader can click finalize at any stage in the process.
“The key problem with groups is drop out, and the pre-authorization allows them to commit and wait for friends to join.”
He adds that 80% of groups are finalized currently through the technology.
Robb also says that Make It Social is seeing group sizes increase as a result of the functionality. Post-booking, the company asks leaders if they have invited more friends as a result of the system and is seeing group sizes increase from two or three to seven.
The Skiworld tie-up is interesting because Make It Social has pitched to the U.K. ski specialist twice in the past before honing the product and striking the current deal.
“Skiworld has been really supportive and hoped we would crack the back of it. It's a real testament to the team’s work.”
The company continues to look to the ticketing segment for growth as well as the package travel market and is also talking to airlines and hotel chains.