STARTUP STAGE: StayTick is a membership-based hotel booking platform

StayTick

For an annual membership fee of €25, StayTick says its members save up to 25% on bookings at more than 500,000 hotels worldwide.

The founders have experience at traditional travel agencies as well as companies such as Barcelo Group, Expedia and BeMyGuest. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

StayTick is a membership-based hotel booking platform that allows you to book hotels at an exclusive price that is not available on any other websites. StayTick helps you to save time and money.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

As a membership-based hotel booking platform, we help our members to book their stays at truly cheap prices and save a lot on their trips. At StayTick we built our own tech-house creating a strong base of connectivity with many chains, hotels and third parties in order to get the maximum of available rooms and properties at every destination. Then our algorithm finds available rooms, compares it with other OTAs, shows the lowest room rates and calculates how much the user will save if they book on Staytick.com.

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

• Strengths: Team knowledge, expertise in travel, tech and finance, on top of our previous experience in launching startups, succeeding in raising funds, generating revenue in niche markets and business segments.
• Weaknesses: The hotel booking-based on membership is a new concept to the end-user even though there is a lot of services with monthly and annual subscriptions around us like gyms, streamings services, e-commerce, etc. But when it comes to travel, it is still a new concept that needs to build awareness. We don't have deep pockets like giant OTAs. We are a small and young team, and at the moment StayTick is only available in English and Spanish.
• Opportunities: Thanks to our technology and platform, we are able to unlock the best prices for our clients, and the saving is really demonstrated from the first booking thus the number of daily new subscribers is growing fast. Opening more markets in Europe will help to scale up faster. Also, we are exploring adding more products, such as rental cars, transfers, cruises using the same technique and technology. We believe there is a lot of good things to be done, we are super excited about it.
• Threats: Catastrophic scenes such as COVID-19, climate issues, drastic changes like what we are experiencing right now, economic crises, all these will impact our growth, that is why we would like to vary our set of offered products to widen the clients base and not rely on only one market or one service. 

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

Nowadays the clients know when and where they would like to go, but price is still a key factor for the final decision. They spend long hours trying to get the best deal. We help our members to book the hotel they want at truly cheap prices and therefore save. Once a member tries our tools, they will stick to it and keep booking through us. Why pay more for the same room if you can get it way cheaper?

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

We have learned to choose the battles we could win. Obviously, we can't compete with other OTAs that have huge budgets to spend on online marketing. It's a very crowded area, that's why we do it old school - we do a lot of cold calls and partnerships with groups, companies, gyms, associations, communities, etc. We go straight to those clients who we believe will use our service, we introduce our service and tool to them, as well as the value that we bring to the table.

StayTick could be the perfect fit for many companies that would like to offer a great additional value to their clients - we can work with airlines, car-hailing, car rentals, etc. Plenty of companies could offer Staytick membership to their clients as a bonus to bond with their clients and make them happy.

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

In December 2020, we got inspired by the business model of Amazon Prime, where clients pay to get the service faster and also get more benefits. Why don't we work it around and adapt to hotel bookings? Clients make an annual subscription and in exchange, they will start saving from the first booking, and they will book again because the value is super clear and well demonstrated. Now with the world reopening, we expect the number of subscribers to increase and thus the night bookings will follow. 

How and when will you make money?

We make money from subscriptions and also we take a cut from every booking. As per our survey, average subscribers make two to three bookings a year with an average length of stay of five to seven nights.

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

Both founders come from the travel industry:

• Mavi Garay - has been managing her firm as a boutique travel agency for 15 years with a strong background in operation and service contracting. She managed to grow the company from a traditional retail travel agency with one desk to eight desks, working with high-profile clients supplying top end, luxury services.
• Nabil Elshafaey - after working across multiple known brands in travel such as Barcelo Group, Expedia and BeMyGuest in Singapore, launched Visit & Go, the first online marketplace for tours and activities in Arabic and also launched TRYPS, as a B2B distributor of tours & activities. The firm has grown very fast working with over than 360 partners such as Booking, Ctrip, Singapore airport, Wego, etc. 

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our vision in this term is to provide equal chances to everyone by embracing their backgrounds, culture, sexual orientation or gender. Our startup is really well balanced - 50% of the workforce are women.

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

It is always hard to start any new project from scratch with limited funding and manpower. It takes a longer time to get them both, but what is actually harder is to make the idea or vision come true, translated into tools and problem-solving techniques.

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

We see a real need and market gap where StayTick could fit in. As a small company, we can move, learn and take decisions faster. We also approach our potential clients directly - we don't rely on online marketing only because clients became more sensitive to it and unless they really need your service, they will skip your ad. Our goal is to generate the biggest positive impact possible, so our clients become our ambassadors and recommend us to their network, friends and family. The same happened to Discord once used it for the first time, people started to promote it within their social circles.

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

We expect the business volume to keep growing and the number of subscribers too, as long as the world keeps reopening.

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

We would like to add more services and products, have the best talent and crazy-creative engineers, open more markets, and finally, the dream of every entrepreneur is to hit the bell at the Nasdaq, so ours will not be different.