STARTUP STAGE: Staze is a last-minute booking app for holiday rentals

Staze

Founded in February 2020, Staze is targeted to spontaneous travelers who want to book stays starting within two weeks.

To promote the app, the company has signed up more than 100 social media influencers, each with at least 10,000 followers, to use it for a trip this summer. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Staze is a last-minute booking app for staycations in the United Kingdom, sort of like a mix between Airbnb and Lastminute.com but with a bigger vision. We allow people to book hassle-free trips within 14 days, giving people the freedom to live spontaneous and more fulfilled lives. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your start up.

There are two main business problems we are solving, and through doing so we will be creating new guest demand. The first problem is on the holiday rental side. Forty-five percent of the time, dedicated holiday rentals are empty with no one in them, the equivalent to 50 million days of empty holiday rental nights a year in the U.K. alone with 1.2 billion across the world. Holiday rentals are a distressed asset that we want to utilize.

The second problem is on the guest side. It’s incredibly difficult to book a last-minute trip, it takes four hours and up to 12 Google searches for a guest to find somewhere they want to stay. This often puts people off booking a last-minute trip, the whole process is broken. We want to remove the blockers to booking those trips and make it cheaper, easier and faster to do so. By doing that we create new demand in new areas, allowing people to live more fulfilled lives and make the most out of every day.

In terms of the technology side of things we are app based and we use channel managers to integrate new properties into the app. Using these means that all of our supply is from professional property managers rather than individuals like you get on Airbnb.

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

Our strength lies in our brand and our product. There are incumbents like Snaptrip and Whimstay that have gone after this opportunity in the past but they’ve copied the Airbnb model. We’re creating a brand which is beyond travel, rooted in the fundamental belief that every day is something special and this means developing a brand which signifies more than just last-minute travel but a new way of navigating life with greater fulfilment. We’re also hyper-focused on our product. Every single product decision that we make is done to make it easier for people to book last-minute trips rather than just replicating what already exists in a broken industry -  it shouldn’t take four hours to book a trip it should take 4 minutes.

One weakness we have is that none of our team have a background in travel or property management. There’s a lot we need to upskill ourselves on to fit and understand the travel market. The flipside of that is that we can each come at it with fresh minds and not be held to pre-existing industry constraints.

We have one massive opportunity and that is that right now is the absolute best time in the history of travel to launch a last-minute travel staycation app. Everyone’s going to be stuck in the U.K. for the next couple of months and we will be there to facilitate them to book trips all around the country.

Our biggest threats come from incumbent companies such as Airbnb, Booking.com or any of the large hotel brands. There is always the chance that they could come after us in this space and build tactical teams in local environments to do what we’re doing on an advertising basis. At the moment they don’t, but ultimately we are always mindful of that risk.

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

A pain point from the industry perspective is that it is very difficult to get good last-minute guests. They are often seen as the people who are going off to have parties and wreck places and so we’ve spent a lot of time looking into what we can do to ensure we get the best last-minute guests. This includes looking at what precautions we can put in place. A big part of that is verifying every single guest’s ID and providing every single property with a £500 security deposit. We are able to do that using third-party verification platform Superhog.

In terms of the pain point we are addressing for customers we use the analogy of Blockbuster versus Netflix. Twenty years ago you’d have to go to a Blockbuster store and look for 20 to 30 minutes to find a DVD. Netflix shortened that whole process down to a matter of minutes. Travel at the moment is a lot like how Blockbuster was. You have to look through hundreds of properties and locations, taking hours over the process. Staze is implementing a recommendation engine to know where you’re most likely to want to go. Customers only need to browse for five minutes before making that last minute decision of wanting to be spontaneous.

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

We are betting on three areas to draw users onto the app. These are influencer marketing, physical marketing and social media marketing. In terms of influencers we have already have over 100 ready to go away this summer within the U.K., each with a minimum of 100,000 followers.

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

We were able to establish a genuine need for our product before COVID hit. In our first three weeks we realized there was a gap with property management- 45% of the time properties were sat there empty.

When speaking to property managers we determined that they were willing to list them on our last-minute discount site, and we managed to get 4,000 properties committed in our first week.  We also realized there were blockers to guests making spontaneous decisions. Price was a key one of these and was our initial focal point. We quickly realized that price was a weak factor to compete on and would only result in a race to the bottom.

It became clear that ease is in fact the key problem, a hypothesis we will be able to validate in the months after our launch on April 12. Our bet is that we will increase guest demand overall if we can make it easier to book last-minute trips. Essentially we have validated our supply side hypothesis and believe we will validate our demand side when we are up and running. In terms of our addressable market, the last-minute holiday rental market is worth £40 billion.

How and when will you make money?

We’re a commission-based business and take a cut of each booking. We expect to be making money immediately from the April 12 when the app launches.

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

The founding team consists of Jay Olenicz (CEO), Henry Popiolek (COO) and Dustin Silk (CTO). Jay’s background is as management consultant, a position he worked in for four years at Newton Europe. During that time he worked on projects involving nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, the NHS and the Cabinet Office. He also rowed across the Atlantic, an achievement which got him into the Guinness Book of World Records 2020! Henry also worked as a management consultant for two and a half years, with his projects including FMCG and large-scale operational change across County Councils. Dustin has worked as a creative technologist in app development and team management for ten years for companies Media Monks and Phantom, an embedded agency within Google.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Our team of eight is already diverse, an important quality which we will be ensuring to maintain in future recruitment. We work on the principle that every applicant ought to be afforded equal opportunity. We don’t currently adhere to a quota-based system but instead work on an individual basis to ensure that every member of our team is selected in a fair, merit-based way. We recently hired two new people through the government’s Kickstart Scheme designed to help 16 to 24 year-olds whose employment prospects had been damaged by the pandemic.

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

The biggest obstacle we faced came when lockdown came into force just 3 weeks after we started taking bookings, meaning travel stopped for four months. We faced an extremely difficult decision as to whether we should carry on with the business. Henry and Jay went back to contract work in order to survive and soon realized that Staze had shown enough initial potential that despite the risks it was worth pursuing.

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

The key to our success is the team, we’ve pulled together, including our advisory partners. We fundamentally believe that we have the best team to go after this opportunity, a team which is solving obvious problems in a marketplace where no incumbents have attempted to tackle them before.

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

Hopefully in a year’s time we will have raised a successful seed investment round and be in a position to have started scoping out opportunities to expand into Europe.

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

Currently our end-game really just depends on what comes along. Ideally, we would like to see the whole business cycle through, but if acquisition opportunities do come along we certainly are not planning to rule them out.