STARTUP STAGE: Rebound Travel has a cash-retention solution for travel suppliers

Rebound Travel

Founded in response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebound Travel helps travel companies retain cash by offering customers non-cash alternatives as refunds.

The company, one of PhocusWire's Hot 25 Startups for 2021, is founded by Tobias Wessels, a former Google[x] CFO and senior vice president at Adara.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

We allow companies to retain cash from payments by offering customers attractive non-cash alternatives. Airlines, hotels or attractions retain cash and ensure that travelers return to them for future travel.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We deploy proprietary algorithms so that our partners offer the optimum offer like a travel voucher to a traveler, which ensures that the travelers will give up their entitled cash refund. Our platform ensures that companies retain their desired cash amount while ensuring that opportunity costs are minimized. 

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

• Strength: Strong leadership team and first-mover advantage
• Weakness: We are a small company with limited resources and can't (yet) play all around the world.
• Opportunities: To expand from the airline space to hospitality and then later to the retail vertical
• Threats: Companies could try to do what we do in-house - which is much easier said than done 

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

We allow companies to increase their cash balance by leveraging their customers essentially as their bank. The traveling customers benefit because they receive high-value offers from travel companies, which increases their loyalty.

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

We've already established partnerships in the hospitality space and partners are lining-up to work with us. Our value proposition resonates, and we are now raising an early round to invest in our sales team.

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

The dire financial situation under COVID for most travel companies surfaced the need for our solution. We quickly saw that there is common ground and an opportunity to bring travelers and travel providers together and essentially collaborate financially. The refunds under COVID are a $50 billion opportunity that we've addressed, but we are already seeing interest from nearby verticals including retail where refunds and exchanges create a $600 billion challenge per year worldwide.

How and when will you make money?

We are not charging a set-up or monthly fee. Instead we bring money back to our partners and charge a commission on that amount that we retain. In essence we bring the budget to our budget. 

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

Our team has decades of deal-making experience in the travel space. Our board members including Mark Schwab, the former CEO of Star Alliance, all bring deep experience from the airline space to Rebound, which is a phenomenal asset to count on.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

I'm myself an immigrant to the United States and in each hiring decision we try to hire people that look less like our existing team in terms of age, gender or background.

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

We found that even with a great product and customer adoption time is our most limiting factor. We see so many opportunities, e.g., in adjacent verticals, and unfortunately say no to many because we don't have enough time or resources to work on those new initiatives. 

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

With Rebound we've established a new business category "Cash Retention," which resonates with companies during this crisis but is of importance to any company even during normal times. Who doesn't want to keep cash and customers?

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

There will be many more partners that are working with us, and we will also have begun to exploit opportunities outside travel. Our goal is to offer customers an embedded e-commerce experience that allows any company to offer customers attractive non-cash offers and retain cash in refund or situations of a product exchange. 

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

For the moment we want to bring the benefits of Rebound to as many partners and traveling customers as possible. The underlying economics of our business are very attractive and are very mindful when it comes to financing.