Curating proper adventures, for a quick weekend or longer.
Business overview
Location | London, United Kingdom |
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Social media | |
Website | www.muchbetteradventures.com |
Sectors | Travel, Leisure & Sport Digital B2C |
Company number | 06916506 |
Incorporation date | 27 May 2009 |
Investment summary
Business highlights
- Sales of £1.24m in first 2 months of 2020, up 167%
- Fast Covid-19 recovery - back to year on year growth in July
- Organic traffic grew 170% year on year in July
- Covid response featured as best practice in Which? and Guardian
Idea
Introduction
In 2018, the market for adventure travel was estimated to be worth over £500bn globally, and growing 21% a year as our demand for adventure and experience-rich lives expands rapidly.
We’re filling the void for a specialist marketplace that makes it easy to do just that, with every booking also supporting critical conservation work.
Whether it’s a quick weekend or an epic expedition, our curated collection of award-winning adventures are led by handpicked local hosts, so you can just rock up and have a blast with other good people - something we all need now more than ever.
Our powerful in-house platform enables selected hosts to run trips exclusively for our passionate community and automates the entire booking flow - replacing the traditional tour operator or agency with a more efficient and scalable model.
We’re building market leadership in the UK first, but 12% of sales are organically coming from overseas - there's a global opportunity ahead of us.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Growth has been very strong, with total adventure revenues up 148% in 2019 and 167% in the first 2 months of 2020. Sales reached £1.24m in Jan and Feb 2020.
Covid-19 slowed sales significantly from March to May. We believe that we are well positioned to recover quickly, and July revenues are already back to 15% YonY growth, despite 60% less marketing spend, reduced team and only 25% of trips re-opened.
Here's why;
1. ORGANIC STRENGTH
Organic search traffic grew over 170% a year in July. We rank in Google positions 1 or 2 for key terms including 'Adventure Holidays', 'Adventure trips', 'Trekking Holidays', 'Kayaking Holidays' and 'Adventure Weekends'.
2. LOYAL CUSTOMERS
Repeat and referral bookings account for 41% of bookings in last 12 months. We've had 3100 trip reviews averaging 4.7/5 and 80% of customers have not requested refunds on Covid affected trips, instead they are postponing for future travel.
3. ENHANCED REPUTATION
We have received 5* reviews from customers and featured in Which? and Guardian for our response to Covid-19
4. DIVERSE TRIP RANGE
We have good trip capacity across a range of domestic and short haul destinations, and 44 countries available in total. We are working on many new destinations for 2021.
5. RESILIENT MARKET
Our recent adventure market survey of over 3000 travellers indicated 95% hope to do an overseas adventure before the end of 2021.
6. AGILE BUSINESS MODEL
We were safely running trips again (where restrictions allowed) from early July.
Monetisation strategy
Our hosts typically run trips exclusively for our customers on agreed dates through the year, and pay us a commission based on the group size. This aligns us perfectly - hosts pay nothing unless we send them new groups.
Our average commission in Q4 2019 was 21.4% but we believe there is potential to earn 25-30% - the more people in a group, the higher commission we earn on that departure.
On average in 2019 we spent £80 on marketing to acquire a new booking, a 17% drop YonY as organic (free) traffic from search engines, repeat bookings, word of mouth, PR and partnerships grows.
We're currently averaging £172 revenue per booking - 66% up YonY. This is due to growing average booking values and commission margins, which we expect to continue increasing as we expand our range of longer trips and increase occupancy on each departure.
After repeat bookings, the lifetime value of each customer is higher still.
Future revenue streams include integrating flights, travel insurance and trip add-ons.
Use of proceeds
We believe that platform businesses like ours will emerge the long term winners in the travel market. With no trip running costs, and more ability to adapt to new opportunities than traditional operators, we believe Covid-19 is likely to accelerate that trend.
This investment will allow us to invest in areas we think will accelerate the recovery and gain market share, including curating new adventures, content production to fuel organic search engine, social and word of mouth traffic, and enhancing the booking experience.
We believe that we will have sufficient cash reserves to operate into 2022 on a wide range of Covid scenarios, but are planning a much larger investment round at a higher valuation once the market starts to ramp up with more certainty.
This will allow us to even more rapidly expand our trip range, content and brand building activity and increase our presence in international markets, thereby increasing the value of the business.
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