STARTUP STAGE: Holibob is a marketplace connecting activity suppliers with resellers

Holibob

Holibob is a B2B marketplace for tours and experiences that provides resellers such as airlines, hotels, travel agents and OTAs with an inventory that has been vetted for safety and quality. 

Launched in March 2019, Holibob currently has more than 14,000 tours and experiences in its system across more than 80 countries. 

What is your 30‐second pitch to investors?

Holibob provides an innovative and independent B2B marketplace for tours and experiences, helping consumer facing travel brands to access safe and ethical tours and experiences via a best‐in‐class technology solution.

Holibob enables our B2B travel partners to access an incremental revenue stream, while improving their customers’ experience and generating deep brand experiences. In this highly fragmented tours and experiences market, travel brands have a real need for technology partners that they can trust and rely on, this is Holibob.

We provide investors with the opportunity to access incredible returns on investment, while also allowing them to invest in a business that provides a sustainable solution in the tours and experiences market.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Holibob is a business-to-business marketplace for tours and experiences, providing airlines, hotels, travel agents, tour operators and online travel agents with a premium inventory that is safe, ethical and high quality. We help and enable consumer facing travel brands to gain a unique selling opportunity in the fastest growing vertical in travel: Experiences.

Currently consumers can buy quality hotels, flights, car hire, etc. in a streamlined and digitized form, which does not fully exist in the tours and experiences B2B market. Consumers are not often able to access quality tours and experiences via their chosen travel vendors. This is the problem that Holibob solves.

Our best‐in‐class technology solution enables consumer facing travel brands to access a curated and personalized feed of tours and experiences. This allows our partners to generate deep brand experiences with their own consumers, ensuring that the inventory that Holibob provides, is aligned with their brands values, but also the interests of their individual customers.

What inspired you to create this company? 

As young working millennials, we wanted to access highly engaging, exciting and unique experiences, that we could find in one place.  We therefore set out to build a marketplace where people could find these kinds of experiences that they could fit into a long weekend. When we created the Holibob B2B marketplace and started to engage with suppliers, we realized that the vast majority were hindered by existing tech limitations. We believed that this fast‐ growing sector could and should be digitized, following a similar path to the hotel and flight markets.

Therefore, there was this clear gap between the suppliers we wanted to experience, and the consumer facing travel brands that wanted to buy these experiences for their consumers. The more we delved deeper, the more we realized that this was an issue and a problem that we could resolve and Holibob could transform.

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

• Strengths
  • 14,000+ premium, safe and ethical tours and experiences across 80+ countries
  • Best‐in‐Class Technology
  • Easy and simple plug and play API solution
  • Team of ambitious founders with highly experienced travel industry experts
  • Curatable and personalized product offering
  • Nominated for 'Top Innovation in Travel' at The Globe Awards; TTE 2020 'Launchpad'
  • Independent and privately owned ‐ solely B2B/B2B2C focused
• Weaknesses
  • A newcomer into the experience sector
  • High demand from partners and suppliers in first year
  • Diversification of current product portfolio (75% Europe/ROW 25%)
  • Finding the right people with the right passion to join our expanding team
• Opportunities
  • 80% of current activity and adventure holiday bookings take place offline
  • Travel brands wanting to capitalize on the trend/growth of tours & experiences
  • The travel market has an urgent need for innovative travel tech solutions
  • Becoming the gold standard for tours and experiences in B2B sector
  • Bridging the gap between suppliers and partners to personalize product to the consumer desires
  • Creating unique and personalized content with big data
• Threats
  • Global slowdown in travel due to global events
  • Brexit in mid‐long term

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

Best‐in‐class technology is highly attractive to scaling consumer-facing brands - they need innovative solutions that can handle the growing demand on their platforms. Thanks to our cloud‐based solution and cutting‐edge technology stack, we are able to meet the demands of all our customers, no matter the scale that they require.

Safe, ethical and quality supply - consumer facing travel brands value their brands and what their consumers think of them. Holibob appreciates this and therefore is striving to ensure the quality and reliability of our suppliers. This helps to protect the brands that we work with and ensure that their customers have fantastic experiences.

Finally, price and instant booking are always key for our partners! Holibob is able to provide both successfully, with our competitive rates and instant confirmation from our large product inventory. 

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

We have spoken to hundreds of people within the industry about the issues that face the tours and experiences market, from here we have presented solutions and listened to what the feedback has been. Absorbing this feedback and processing it has allowed us to iterate the technology and the business model to ensure that it fits the needs of the industry.

How and when will you make money? 

We generate revenue now and do this through commissions generated by selling tours and experiences. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

We, Angus & Craig, started in the travel industry just over 18 months ago, straight out of university. We started a ski business, which turned over £135,000 in its first six months of trading. This was all done with no marketing budget. This gave us a start in the industry and helped us to understand the nuisances of the experiences sector.

We have a mix of drive, ambition and ability to listen that hopefully gives us the best possible chance to succeed in this difficult and evolving market. Listening to those around you, taking learnings from our past and the experiences that we have gained is an invaluable asset when it comes to building Holibob.

We are supported by Holibob’s highly experienced founding team members. Nathan Adams, Chief Commercial Officer, brings 20+ years’ experience within the travel industry, having worked at Emirates, dnata, Booking.com as well as some of Dubai’s leading attractions & experiences. Graeme Bryce, Chief Technology Officer, brings also 20+ years’ experience in developing and building some of the best‐in‐class technology for blue chip companies globally, including UBS and JP Morgan, as well as scaling prominent startups within Europe.

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

The most difficult part of our business has been growing to the scale that is required by our partners, in such a short time. We now work with over 1000+ suppliers and have taken great care to validate and check their products/services. Doing this has been a huge amount of work but a very rewarding task to ensure the trust of our partners who are working with us.

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

Our team. The founders have the enthusiasm and grit that is required to get a start‐up off the ground. However, we have also attracted some incredible talent.

It is this mix of youthful enthusiasm and industry experience, combined with leading technology and great product, that will help Holibob make an impact.

A year from now, what state do you think your start‐up will be in?

We will have a supplier base that is focused on Europe, Middle East and key cities within Asia, which will service key global markets. We will have a highly engaged and passionate team of people that are all working to improve and develop the current tours and experiences market for the B2B segment.

We will be working alongside other tech start‐ups and scale ups in this industry in order to improve both our suppliers’ and partners’ experience and to strive towards our goal of digitizing and simplifying the tours and experiences market.

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

First, we want to build a sustainable and profitable business and, while we have our goals for the future, our current passion and focus is to position Holibob as a leader for tours and experiences within the B2B travel sector.

Secondly, the market needs sustainable businesses in order to guide the industry towards a greener and more ethical industry. We want to do this not only through the suppliers that we work with but also through the way that we manage our business.