STARTUP STAGE: JetCamp wants a slice of the European camping market

JetCamp

JetCamp wants to tap into the €5 billion European camping market with its campsite search and booking platform.

JetCamp has just received early-stage funding from Falkensteiner Ventures to help it accelerate growth in Europe.

What is your 30‐second pitch to investors?

Hi, there’s a potential camper in all of us. Glamping for a weekend break, a farm‐camp for a break with the kids, a family‐camping‐with‐waterpark break during the summer holidays.

The European camping market is a growing €5 billion (512m room-nights) market that is hugely fragmented and has only recently started to professionalize.

JetCamp will be the No.1 booking site for camping holidays and has the right DNA (team, experience, product, IT, cost‐base, financial backing) to succeed in its mission.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

JetCamp is a marketplace that allows people to select, compare and book rentals or pitches on camps across Europe. JetCamp lists more than 90% of all 25,000 European camp sites. This includes larger holiday parks and family campsites but also smaller glamping sites, mini‐campsites and nature‐ and farm‐campsites.

We aim to make the user‐experience fast and simple, similarly to booking a hotel or apartment on the larges booking platforms. From a pure tech point of view: we use elastic search, MariaDB, Laravel, Vue.js, own rest‐api’s. 

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company. 

Strengths:

• Low‐cost, scalable, proprietary platform
• Team with camping, e‐commerce, tour operating, business development experience
• Lean set‐up: “virtual operation” & low‐cost coding base in Lithuania
• Free listing platform 
• Content‐driven, ad‐free platform
• Momentum: (Covid‐19, environmental concerns, social sharing, glamping, back to nature)
• Multilingual platform
• All camping grounds listed in Europe and constant market monitoring competitors
• Points‐of‐interest integrated on maps, allowing for deal with GetYourGuide, Tiqets, Viator or Musement 

Weaknesses:

• New to the market, need to establish consumer trust
• So far bootstrapped, with Falkensteiner Ventures on board stronger base
• Time to build traction
• No user‐generated‐content yet (reviews) 

Opportunities:

• The camping market is professionalizing, connecting via channel managers to OTA’s and camping platforms
• Built or buy channel manager
• Enter B2B market
• Cooperate with adjacent products/brands (i.e. RV‐platforms)
• Patent technologies used to map products
• Own direct contracts with camps
• Extend into adjacent markets 

Threats:

• Run out of cash
• Delays in Covid‐19 vaccine
• New market entrants (China?)
• Competitors with stronger financial backing
• OTA’s could claim larger chunk 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

From a customer perspective: As a customer I want to have an overview of all camp grounds in a country, region or place I’m interested in, not just the ones that are able/willing to advertise on the other platforms out there.

Once I’ve found the right camping I want an aggregated overview of all available rental accommodations and pitches on a camping. The inventory may be split between the camping direct, operators on the camping and tour operators having an allocation, so JetCamp aggregates them and shows inventory, availability and prices in single overview.

From a camping perspective: The platforms that are out there all ask a listing and/or advertising fees or only publish camps of a certain size. This means there is no level‐playing‐field.

JetCamp uses a free (freemium) listing model.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

Right from the start we’ve focussed on three pillars: content, topicality and advanced SEO‐techniques. This has proven successful and created a user‐base.

The usage of blogs, social‐media‐peer‐groups and forums have proven successful and we’ll triple our efforts in this spectrum.

In the short term we’ll add commercial partnerships with tourist boards and adjacent or like‐minded brands and/or products.

Once travel restrictions due to Covid‐19 have eased we’ll add direct ads (seo), referrals, affiliate partnerships and PR.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

The European camping market is enormous. 2019 revenue surpassed €5 billion and the total number of room nights spent grew to 512m.

During a market‐research deep-dive in 2018 we found that existing platforms were single‐source‐market focussed (some not even multilingual), did not cover all camps, did not provide full‐inventory‐overview and were heavily relying on print‐advertising‐ income.

On top everyone was and is very much focussed on international bookings ignoring the fact that the largest customer base (>60%) is found locally as camping is predominantly a domestic travel product. This gave us confidence that our model would work: be inspiring, be local, be complete, be easy to use. 

How and when will you make money?

Where competitors (often originating from traditional companies such as automobile clubs or publishers) charge camps an annual fee to be listed, JetCamp uses a free (freemium) model. Listings on JetCamp.com are free of charge, which makes us unique in the market.

When a camping decides to accept bookings JetCamp receives a commission. A no cure no pay model. To enable online seamless bookings we are connecting channel managers to our booking‐engine. We already generate revenue from affiliate fees and online bookings.

Profitability will probably take another two years as we are currently in an investment phase and working towards a Series A investment.

The early stage investment from Falkensteiner Ventures will be used to further improve our user experience and doubling online‐bookability from 2,500 camps now to 5,000 in six months from now. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Erwin Hoevenaar: in combination, Roderik and I have been in the travel business for more than 40 years. Roderik has a BS‐degree and background in information technology and has helped build some of the larger online travel companies in the Netherlands including Hotelspecials, Sunweb and Thomas Cook.

I (Hoevenaar) have a BA‐degree in tourism and economics and worked in online hotel distribution, e‐commerce and tour operating. After selling Chalets.nl to Belvilla (Oyo) I joined Thomas Cook where I met Roderik. 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

We decided to bootstrap development and launch, which had its own set challenges. Then came Covid‐19. I think weathering the Covid‐19 crisis has been the most difficult part so far. We genuinely believe that we’ll get out stronger, more resilient and clear‐focussed. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

JetCamp is a unique travel startup. We offer a level‐playing‐field solution for camping grounds and operators while at the same time we’re using a combination of technology and extensive content to delight our global audience of travelers.

The Falkensteiner investment will allow us to speed‐up our IT‐roadmap which is full of features that will make the selecting‐comparing‐booking part of a camping holiday a great experience. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We will have connected the most important channel managers, doubled the amount of bookable camping grounds, quadrupled our visitor numbers and released important functionality including automated‐sign‐up for camps. 

What is your end‐game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

We’re open to any scenario. We’re in it because we like it. Let’s go camping!