STARTUP STAGE: GoodBooker wants to end homelessness with every hotel booked

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

GoodBooker is a travel booking website with a social purpose - ending homelessness. 

Every day, individual and business travelers using GoodBooker show their support for people facing homelessness through the hotel bookings they make. Each hotel room, apartment, or unique property booked at goodbooker.co.uk is matched with a contribution towards overnight shelter for those in need. 

GoodBooker offers access to over 29 million listings at incredible prices, turning travel into a force for good. 

We serve individuals that want to make a change at no additional cost and offer businesses an excellent opportunity to make a difference in their communities, without signing up to costly corporate travel packages. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

GoodBooker is a travel booking website that seeks to end homelessness with each hotel booking. The business is led by our belief that significant societal issues, like homelessness, cannot be solved solely by relying on donations.

We seek to capitalize on the increasing number of customers looking to make a positive impact when choosing where to spend their money. We have partnered with Booking.com to provide our users access to their platform of more than 29 million listings, and then we share the booking commission for all accommodation booked through our website with people in need.

We distribute a portion of the commission we make on every room booking with some of the world's leading homelessness charities, including Depaul International, to support people facing homelessness. 

This is the start of our journey to develop a profitable travel business serving small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals with an online travel agency (OTA) that supports their corporate social responsibilities (CSR) or individual goals.

With GoodBooker, it's now possible to socially offset your travel. 

GoodBooker is a digital travel solution, so our technology ensures travelers can access accommodation via our website from any device, enabling us to establish a presence in the market and build a customer base. 

Our next step will be to develop a platform to better serve our business customers.

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

Strengths: GoodBooker offers our customers access to Booking.com's listing and pricing, meaning they can have a social impact without spending a penny more on accommodation. 

As a digital travel solution, we're a lean-business operation, but our rapidly growing network is crucial.

We've already established strong relationships with charitable partners to ensure the money made on bookings reaches those most in need. 

In addition, we also have a supportive group of individual and business customers. These two groups help us build our customer base through advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing. 

As bonus, there are a limited number of OTAs offering a solution to 'socially offset' travel.

GoodBooker presents a CSR opportunity for businesses that want to make a real-world impact through a simple change of booking website, rather than an initiative that's going to break the bank.

Weaknesses: We're reliant upon Booking.com in the short term to manage the booking process and maintain an extensive selection of listings at competitive prices.

As we scale our business and develop our booking platform, we will reduce that reliance.

Our customers must also make an active choice to use our company beyond other OTAs that are heavily marketed. 

Opportunities: There continues to be a growing market of customers booking hotels online, so OTAs aren't going away anytime soon. 

However, it's difficult for new booking sites to stand-out in a crowded marketplace unless they're bringing something new to the table. GoodBooker is doing exactly that.

In a world where differences in prices and technology are hard to distinguish, there's a growing interest in customers looking to spend their money with companies that have a positive impact on society and the environment. 

By fulfilling the appetite to make a difference, GoodBooker will appeal to both the rational and compassionate thinking behind every purchase.

Working with Booking.com, the largest OTA, will bring opportunities to expand as we scale our booking numbers.

Threats: Online travel is a highly competitive market to raise customer awareness. Plus, in real terms, there's a relatively low barrier to entry.

There also seems to be some societal pressure on travel that may start to impact numbers. 

However, we are well-placed to support individuals and businesses that wish to travel responsibly and socially offset each trip, contributing positively to CSR efforts for the latter.

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

GoodBooker is looking to make responsible and socially impactful travel, easy.

With our users, we heal the wider social issue of homelessness and enable travel to be used as a tool for good. 

Hotel booking technology is tried and tested, but our unique repurposing of commission is helping to alleviate the issues of homelessness in the cities that our customers travel to and sleep in.  

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

Find and land the stickiest customers we can. 

In an industry that has marketing budgets extending into ten figures, we are focusing on signing up as many SME businesses as possible that will use us as their main hotel booking partner.

We offer the companies that partner with us a range of support, including use of our partner logo to promote their positive impact.

Alongside this, we will continue to build consumer bookings through social media marketing, promotion through brand ambassadors and using the networks of our charity partners.

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

Desktop, quantitative research focused on social impact OTAs with minimal international operators. The total addressable market is technically huge, given the billions in revenue up for grabs; however, we have focused on what can realistically be achieved in a market that has significant marketing spend. 

Building up our corporate customers will help to secure predictable revenue based on their annual volume of hotel stays, while also opening new marketing opportunities to their networks.

We also use in-person qualitative feedback to validate the appetite for a travel solution with a social purpose.

How and when will you make money?

Due to our arrangement with Booking.com, revenue has started to come through from day one; however, this will take 12-18 months to build to a volume that will begin to support a broader team. 

We are seeking funding over the next six months to develop our corporate platform offering and a mobile app. If an investment can cover our outgoing, we expect to be profitable within two years. 

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

James: This is my first foray into founding a business. In what already feels like a previous life, I worked for PwC becoming a Chartered Accountant and working in their Corporate Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions team, helping business owners realize the value in their businesses. 

Tom: A marketing and communications expert with more than 9 years of B2B marketing experience. He learned his craft in the socially conscious renewable energy sector, before moving into technology with a United Kingdom-based SaaS company that he's helped become a globally recognized, enterprise-level solution.

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

We definitely won't be alone with our challenges of balancing our impatience for growth with trying to have a life outside of the office. 

It has also been a challenge picking up the multi-hatted roles of founders. While this often leads to long days trying to learn new skills using how-to videos on YouTube, it is also one of the most rewarding.

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

A clear message: more can be done to solve the important world issues when companies and consumers focus decisions on a broader goal than pure profitability or cost.

We believe customers will increasingly base their purchasing decisions upon the wider social and environmental impact, rather than solely upon price. We are offering an approach that competes on price while also delivering a social good: offsetting travel to support the communities that we live in and visit. 

Time will reveal whether we are the lucky ones, however, in the meantime, we follow Thomas Jefferson's view: "I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."  

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

A year from now, we hope to have developed strong relationships with more than 500 corporate partners that book hotels through us on a regular basis to tackle homelessness.

We'll have an evolving solution to maximize the ways our product offering can give customers the best booking experience. 

And most importantly, we'll have a positive story about the significant impact all of our customers had on people unfortunate enough to be facing homelessness in our communities. 

In doing so, we aim to prove out the concept that a travel business can be profitable, grow and deliver on social change; complementing on the great work that our partner charities and non-profit organizations deliver.

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

Initially, we will be enamored with a business that can deliver sustainable profits and make a significant difference to the lives of people facing homelessness. 

Beyond this, we would love to either remain private or to be acquired by one of the larger OTAs, enabling us to utilize their scale and operations to make an even greater positive impact.