
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.
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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.
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