STARTUP STAGE: GetGuided wants to connect corporate travelers with tours

GetGuided

GetGuided wants to work with hotels, travel management companies and directly with corporates to bring curated tours and activities to the business travel space.

Realizing how crowded the tours and activities market was, the company decided to focus on automating tours and activities via its B2B marketplace.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

GetGuided is an online B2B platform, helping hotels, travel management companies and corporates find and book tailored private tours and experiences by verified language guides in a single click.

What inspired you to create this company?

Entrepreneurial spirit runs in the family, which affected the mentality I grew up with. Having heard and seen how people started from the ground up with nothing in their hands, after university I wanted to create and start from scratch, but with global ambition.

Getting introduced to Airbnb in 2015, I thought that tours and activities could benefit from the same model. Shortly we realized how crowded the market was already and we decided to explore to find what we can offer to the world and make the industry better.

That is when we met Roy, a concierge at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Edinburgh, and quickly realized what we needed and wanted to be.

Our goal is to be the world’s go‐to B2B platform connecting hotels, TMCs and corporates with verified local suppliers of tailored private tours and experiences.

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

Strength: I always believed that the core of any business is the people. That is why the main focus was on the team. We have a strong tech team with extensive experience of building and offering the right products to the market, and a driven business team who are very unorthodox and creative with their business and sales approach.

The tech team has built the solution intuitive enough for suppliers and buyers to use but smart enough to stand out from current solutions. My background in human resources established an on-boarding process, ensuring that every supplier on the platform is verified an curated.

Our smart sales and partnership process helped us to be one of the first to new markets.

Weakness: With a small team based in Scotland, we have not had a chance to raise big sums of investment yet. Running on a tight budget means that we are not able to implement all of our buzzing ideas and build all the technology we know the market requires.

However, that helps us to plan and prioritize and boosts our creativity.

Opportunities: I believe we are bringing the right technology into the market that is in desperate need of innovation. These are tours and experiences for the “high‐end group leisure market” and “corporate and MICE market.” Offering a smart and easy-to-use solution to the hotels and travel buyers in these two spaces is what's putting us in a leading position.

We also believe we are one of the few platforms with the opportunity for local suppliers to build their community of experienced and trusted guides, sell more while keeping the most flexibility they can.

Threats: With growing competition and bigger companies stepping in there is always a threat of startups. However, with constant innovation, the right market offering and a strong team we believe we will have what to takes to put us on the map.

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

As a marketplace we are looking at the pain points of two sides.

Buyers: Hotels and travel buyers, such as DMCs, group tour organizers, travel agencies and MICE organizers, have had their way of booking the tours for years, through phone calls and emails.

The current platforms tried to offer good solutions but they were not the right ones.

The hotel concierge or travel consultant does not always want nor has time to scroll the lists of pre‐set tours and experiences; they want to tell the guide the guest’s interests, time slots, budget and get the match instantly.

With our single click instant RFP solution, we are answering that need. Our buyers and partners now have a choice of choosing from the list of pre‐set tours or instantly asking for a custom itinerary to which matching guides can bid on.

Suppliers: Before launching the platform, we had talked to guides and found out they had concerns with current offered platforms that can be fit under a single umbrella: inflexibility.

Three main points were: updating the calendars on all the platforms, needing to sign into the app to manage the requests and not having intimacy with the platforms. We have taken away these problems by offering possibly the most flexible solution through single email integrated system.

By working with only verified suppliers and constantly keeping in touch with the suppliers, we made it more personal and we are committed to keeping it personal via our local ambassadors within destinations.

We also are currently testing ideas for the pain points of business travelers, to turn a business trip into more enjoyable experience.

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

Competing on digital space of ads with other larger platforms for us would not be realistic. With a direct sales and partnership model to travel buyers, hotels and corporates, we are getting our volume and bookings. 

It took a bit of time to find product‐market fit, but we are confident in our current offering and are ready to scale.

We also have recently signed two trial agreements with a global flight search OTA, a luxury short-term rental OTA and several other large companies.

The goal is to provide high-quality tours and experiences for their users and guests.

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

Coming out of university, we made sure we talked to people. We have talked to more than 1,000 travelers, and given free test tours to more than 300 people. We have also talked to dozens of hotels and TMCs and hundreds of local guides to understand the needs of the market, before we even built a platform.

After launch we signed up more then 400 tours and experiences (with another 1,000-plus on the waiting list). We have got leads and deals with more than 150 partners and served more than 5,000 guests with 99% satisfaction rate in 11 destinations.

How and when will you make money?

We operate on a commission‐based model; however, we are also testing other ideas with our partners and suppliers, that can benefit all.

Although we are currently revenue generating, with current product development, expansion of supply and marketing forces we are not profitable just yet. We are looking to move to profitability in 2021.

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

The team has diverse backgrounds with mass experience. The tech founder has made two exits before joining GetGuided.

Together with our tech lead, both tech team members have rich experience working for global tech companies building impactful solutions.

I have always been entrepreneurial and been involved in small projects and growing startups since the age of 16, either leading them or helping to start.

Most of these projects were related to experiences and international cultures. I have also been a radio host of a travel show for two years.

With that experience, I have decided to finally start a company solving a problem that I believe needs to be addressed.

Another team member has been working as a digital marketing specialist for more than three years.

We have an incredibly strong advisory and mentors board consisting of very experienced travel CFOs and CEOs.

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

Having an HR degree, we quickly established our supply channel and kept growing organically. Our biggest problem was and is the demand side of the marketplace.

We know our niche and we know we are delivering quality, however being small it is not always easy to reach the right partners and the right people.

Our persistence and creativity help us to overcome that hurdle one partner at a time. 

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

We think industry players tried to replicate the success of the biggest players with the same strategy and techniques, without listening to the market needs.

Being constantly in touch with buyers, suppliers and guests and focusing on a niche, whilst keeping it as realistic as possible, is what sets us aside.

What question might we have missed?

We are currently in the process of fundraising and would love to hear from investors as well as any potential partners and suppliers.