Snaptrip
Snaptrip is a marketplace for last minute, discounted UK cottage, lodge and apartment holidays.
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
Categories: Travel, Leisure & Sport Digital B2C
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Investment
sought: - £906,135
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Equity
offered: - 10.38%
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Investment
amount: - £1,477,852
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £7,824,041
Team
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Co Founder & CEO -
Co Founder and CTO -
Commercial Director -
Head of Marketing -
Lead Developer
Idea
Introduction
Snaptrip is a trusted marketplace for people to discover the best last minute self catered holiday deals in the UK. We list c.50,000 UK cottages, lodges and apartments, have sent over 125,000 people on holiday and were voted the country's best Travel Start Up two years in a row.
At present there is to our knowledge no recognised brand in the self catered sector focused on last minute holidays in the UK, mainland Europe or USA. This is in complete contrast to the hotel sector, where companies like Late Rooms, lastminute.com, Hotel Tonight and Secret Escapes focus on distressed inventory.
The self catered holiday sector has similar annual occupancy levels (circa 50%) and yet to our knowledge no brand exists to help managers of holiday rental properties to sell off unsold inventory or for spontaneous, bargain hunting last minute consumers.
Intended impact
Problem:
For last minute holidaymakers existing websites either provide inaccurate availability and pricing or have limited inventory.
For owners and management agents of rental homes there is significant distressed inventory with no dedicated portal to help increase occupancy rates.
Snaptrip solves this problem:
Snaptrip matches the supply with the demand and creates an efficient aggregated marketplace between them to offer a new and totally unique brand to the self catered sector.
We believe that Snaptrip is the first company to accurately aggregate mass UK inventory, which is estimated to be a £4.3bn market (based on 54% occupancy) and unlike other services all the properties are professionally managed, which means there is no chance of fraudulent bookings and your stay will be managed throughout.
Substantial accomplishments to date
- Snaptrip offers over 50,000 accurately aggregated holiday rental properties.
- This is, to our knowledge, more than any other holiday rental platform in the world.
- Custom built pricing and availability platforms present live pricing for all of the 50,000+ properties.
- Won Best New Travel Startup at the 2015 World Travel Market Exhibition.
- Ranked 29th Best UK Startup, and No.1 Travel Startup, 2016 by startups.co.uk.
- Over 35,500 bookings confirmed to date.
- Achieved over 100% growth in revenues each trading year.*
- Significantly reduced customer acquisition costs since 2014.*
- Acquired over 230,000 email members.
- Contribution to revenues by repeat bookers has doubled each trading year.*
- £2.1m invested to date from early stage Venture Capital companies and a range of high profile Angel investors.
*Based on unaudited management accounts
Monetisation strategy
Snaptrip takes a commission on every booking generated, with a larger margin being achieved the closer to departure date a booking is.
As a result, the managers of the inventory on Snaptrip know that the business is trying to sell as much of their unsold inventory as possible.
We believe there is an opportunity in the future to create additional revenue streams through the addition of holiday insurance packages, train tickets, car hire etc etc.
Use of proceeds
We intend to spend the funds raised on Snaptrip's operational costs.
Of Snaptrip's total outgoings, the investment should be broken down into:
48% contribution to marketing.
38% contribution to staff salaries.
14% contribution to operational overheads (office costs for example).
Investors will be receiving A Ordinary Shares, the most senior class of share. In the event of a sale of the company for less than the post money valuation of this round, A Ordinary Shareholders are entitled to a 1x non-participating preference, over standard Ordinary shareholders. Shares rank pari passu in all other aspects.
Market
Target market
As a marketplace, Snaptrip has two customers, the suppliers providing holiday rental properties to sell and the consumers that buy the last minute deals.
Holidaymakers:
The UK self catered holiday market is valued at £4.3bn. It is estimated that 34% of those holidays will be spontaneous last minute breaks and that is the core of Snaptrip's target consumer market.
The aim of Snaptrip is to service those already aiming to depart within a short time frame, but the additional aim of the brand is to create spontaneous holidays that couple, families and groups may not have planned at all, through desirable content and compelling discounts.
Suppliers:
At present Snaptrip works with large scale professional holiday rental companies, giving them valuable sales of their properties that are still available on a last minute basis. The suppliers have anything from 50 - 15,000 properties and Snaptrip aggregates their availability and pricing via technical feeds.
Characteristics of target market
Snaptrip has a team of experts collecting and analysing all the data required to determine the different types of consumers, how to acquire them, how they perform on the website, what they want to see, their average booking values, time to departures etc etc.
From the consumer side, Snaptrip has three main demographic groups, couples, families and groups.
As the company specialises in domestic, short stay holidays ranging from £150 - £6,000 the type of consumers is incredibly broad in terms of socio economic groups, with the length of stay also varying, from spontaneous weekends to two weekly summer holidays.
Other general characteristics of Snaptrip's holidaymakers include:
85% of the searches are conducted by women.
53% of the bookings have at least one pet going away with them.
52% of the bookings have children under the age of 17 travelling with them.
50% of first visits and searches are done on mobile or tablet devices but 85% of the bookings are completed on a desktop computer.
Marketing strategy
At present Snaptrip focuses on digital marketing to get awareness to new consumers but has a strong focus on retention and repeat business, hugely increasing the lifetime value of a customer.
Primarily investment goes in Google Pay Per Click advertising, as it has the ability to be incredibly targeted and as it is a digital marketing channel, detailed analysis can be done of every pound spent as the traffic flows through the website.
As Snaptrip is in its fourth trading year it is now well recognised by Google as being a specialist in last minute cottages and ranks very highly for all key terms.
In 2016 Snaptrip's average Google ranking for over 75 last minute cottage search terms was 51. By the end of August 2017 the average position is 26.
As a result of this growth in natural search traffic (ie non paid traffic) Snaptrip has reduced its individual customer acquisition cost by 20%, while still scaling overall revenue growth by 100% each year.
Competition strategy
While there are many brands that offer holidays to self catered properties on a large scale basis none of them are brands focused on a discount orientated consumer or the suppliers looking to fill empty properties.
There are two types of businesses that could compete with Snaptrip for sales:
1. Aggregation sites like Airbnb, HomeAway, Trip Advisor.
These websites do not have complete control over availability calendars, properties are often duplicated across multiple sites. As a result, consumers can find it a long and drawn out process to get a booking confirmed. This problem is heightened for last minute bookings.
2. Dedicated cottage rental companies.
Although these websites tend to have full control of calendars and can complete bookings immediately, the inventory numbers are small and tend to be geographically limited.
Snaptrip offers a huge range of properties that all have up to date availability and are immediately bookable. Solving both problems for last minute consumers.
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