OFF2 Blog

The little and large combination of James and Michael worked very well during the presentation, both taking it in turns to get the ideas of off2 across to the Judges. The Dragons seemed to ask us paticularly more questions after our pitch than some of the others we had watched previously.

We took this as a positive indication we had presented a good interesting pitch with Hugo Burge commenting on the “rich and varied functionality” of the site.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm3Aa_z9Pxs)

After the presentation it was a chance to sit some meetings with potential travel partners like Hostel Bookers. They have youth hostels and cheap accommodation in over 2,500 worldwide and are keen to work with OFF2. We will be speaking to Paul of Hostel Bookers within the next few weeks to discuss this in alot more detail.

We were also approached by Isango, a leading provider of travel experiences on the internet.

They were seeking to forge a partnership with OFF2, a revenue-share partnership either through a white- label and xml-feed solution or a click-through affiliate model. EIther way it is a partnership that could be very profitable for both companies. Exciting times ahead!!!

Sell more, reduce distribution cost and keep customers happy. Some of the key goals of any successful travel company and one of the purposes of the summit. It gives all sectors of the travel industry a chance to increase business development and plan strategies to achieve their goals.

For OFF2, not only was the summit a chance to form exciting new partnerships, but we were also selected as one of the 20 most exciting new travel companies in Europe. Taking part and competing with other budding travel industry entrepreneurs, and showcasing our products to a select board of industry experts, venture capitalists and angel investors was nerve wracking to say the least!

For James McDowall the CEO and Michael Waylett the CEO this was an exciting opportunity to take part in such a large scale event. During the preparations the nerves could be felt throughout the team as this was our first time publicly showcasing our products in front of the some of the biggest players in travel. (Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzPHt4vxTH4.)

Dick Porter, Co-founder & Director, STA Travel
Dick started STA Travel in the seventies and grew it into a US$1.2 Billion organization employing 2600 people in over 90 countries. Now on the STA Travel board he devotes his time to finding and funding start ups that could replicate such a massive growth.

Hugo Burge, Founder, Howzat Media
Whilst building Cheapflights into an international flight comparison site, Hugo founded Howzat Media investment fund. Investments include WAYN.com, Zoomf.com, TrustedPlaces.com.

Jason Katz, Founder, KP Capital
UBS’s youngest Managing Director, now runs his own private equity fund devoted to investments in the global leisure sector. Jason was involved in the Hilton and Thomas Cook transactions as well as selling lastminute.com to Sabre and Active Hotels to Priceline.

Gerry Samuels, CEO, Travel Capital
Gerry co-founded Gradient Solutions that was acquired by Sabre. Travel Capital invests in companies, with funding requirements ranging from MBO/MBI down to early stage funding. The investment capital is sourced principally from Travel Capital’s Founders, and from anetwork of partners within the institutional private equity world.

John Kent, CEO, youtravel.com
John has been a serial entrepreneur and has managed to build value both as an executive and as an entrepreneur. John founded youtravel.com in February 2006 and the business is expected to reach a turnover of €70m in its first year of operations. Previous positions include lastminute.com UK MD, travelbargains.com CEO and Medhotels.com.

With all the many Online Advertising networks available out there it can sometimes be a bit of a mind boggling exercise to decide on exactly which one will best serve our needs (relevant content / good rates / backend reporting). We are glad to have chosen the Rubicon Project as our ad network provider. As an aggregator site in private beta it works to search many different Ad Networks to find the best possible rate at any given time to meet our needs and gain us the maximum revenue on our pages, at the outset we are assigned to 9 major Ad networks.

With the launch of our social Network and Travel elements in the forthcoming months we hope to maximise the revenue from visits and users. Also using this to give back revenue earned through our incentive scheme to our members.

Click here to view the hotel page - Hotels

James

Over the past few weeks we have had some upcoming changes and developments to the site which are worthy of note.

We have recently started final stage testing on Hotels, which are due to go live anytime soon, full booking functionality is now being acheived with offers being generated. Although some of the data from the Worldspan download files is still somewhat ugly on the eye (odd formatting rules) we are slowly working through and cleaning it up.

Other than Hotel testing we are currently working on the social networking aspects of the site in conjunction with our developers in India. Much of the graphics designs have now been submitted for html/php/ajax creation. Additionally we have just finished our work on network data, this is the data we are looking to utilize on the destinations and local networks pages on the social network aspects, this data will also be used for the ‘know before you go’ section.

We are nearing the final stages now so all hands are on deck to get the final issues completed. We are still open for initial signups, with the pre registration running at just over 16,000 now which is pretty impressive.

James

Off2.com reveals February launch date

 (25 January 2008)

Travel social network OFF2.com will launch on February 25th after successfully securing a first round of private investment and deals to provide travel search and booking functionality.

The Bournemouth-based operation, headed by managing director James McDowell, sales director Harry Ramburn and operations director Michael Waylett, has attracted over 15,000 pre-registered users and is expecting 75,000 by launch day.

The site is planning to have flight, hotel, car hire, theatre and restaurant booking facilities for launch and will also include an insurance cover option.

A booking plug-in for travel products will be run with ecommerce software from IBM and data from Worldspan.

OFF2 also revealed this week that a loyalty programme will be added which allows members to accrue points for publishing product recommendations or reviews on the site, uploading and tagging of video, and booking flights or hotels.

Over the past 2 months we have been working tirelessly on the social networking elements of our new to launch travel site OFF2. In conjunction with our developers and graphics designers we have built a robust and rewarding user experience, our main feature being the ability to plan activities and view establishments through images and virtual tours allied with real time booking functionality for over 54000 Hotels, 200 Airlines and all the major car hire firms. Additionally we have recently opened up partnership agreements to offer real time restaurant bookings throughout Europe, UK theatre tickets and travel policy insurance for any worldwide flights.

It may well be a lot to chew on but were managing to keep up to speed with all the relevant interfaces and data sources, the social networking aspects themselves have also been defined in more detail now – allowing users to not only tag their friends but allow them to tag a destination, be it a restaurant, a bar, a nightclub, a hotel or even just a city. Excitement about this feature is great and we anticipate the community to have a wealth of information at hand in one place, booking a hotel and being able to view only the hotels perfectly shot photos will be a thing of the past.

Participating users will be able to upload their holiday snaps, tag their hotel, their destination and the restaurants they may have visited, finally giving a rating for the destination or the hotel as well, additionally of course they will be able to tag themselves and share their holiday snaps or videos with their friends.

Another feature currently in development is ‘OFF2 Rewards’ we haven’t come up with a nice slogan or name for it yet as its in super early private beta but here’s an insight into how it will work from Founder James McDowall and how the community members will benefit! …

“Whilst receiving some recent negative press we firmly incentives can work, its a great program if actually rewarding and achievable for the user. We believe out travel network allows us to take this to another level, not only rewarding users for purchases but for their activity within the site. That being said an active OFF2 user can receive credits for activity towards either a redeemable cash amount or as a discount off a future booking. We have looked into this in depth and believe that offering back revenue to the community that helps us grow not only has its benefits for us but equally back to the user. We will be releasing exact rewards later this month upon our launch but examples of rewards could be…

100 page views
Having a friend sign up from an invite
Booking a hotel / Flight / Car rental
Adding a Review
Uploading an image
Tagging an image

So pretty much everything activity related will be rewarded, through incentivising users for productive activity we believe we will be able to retain valuable members amidst a highly competitive market and generate valuable new users.”

Having reached our first milestone of 15,000 pre registered users we see this new incentive as yet another reason for users to sign up.

Additionally OFF2 announced today they are seeking Round B Venture Capital funding to cover upcoming site developments, expand their product offerings and gain a market position.

OFF2.Com has agreed to a fantastic partnership with the largest real-time booking network for restaurants and diners in the world, Livebookings. For those of you don’t know anything about them, they are a global network that is a marketing and real-time booking service for restaurants and diners, and provide a convenient service with useful information and great deals. The Livebookings Network has currently some 3,000 participating restaurants in major cities in Europe and over 150 partners. Restaurants include Conran Restaurants, Harvey Nichols Restaurants, Sturehof, Oaxen, The Ritz, Le Gavroche, F12, Riche and Bank Restaurants. They also work with UK partners that include American Express, Harden’s Guide, Airmiles, Visit Britain, Vue Cinemas and The Daily Telegraph. We at OFF2 are obviously proud to be part of such a successful group and look forward to working with them to create a successful partnership!

Michael Waylett

A recent article by well known Analyst Imran Khan and his team at JPMorgan entitled ‘Nothing But Net’, his 2008 Internet Investment Guide pointed out many key factors and topics that will dominate both the business world and the internet over the forthcoming year and beyond. The article offers excellent insight into emerging technologies and fundamental market analysis, in particular offering market sector in depth analysis of Social Networking, Online Travel, Mobile Ad Markets, Ad Exchanges and the Search Engine Market.

Important analysis of the net as a whole pointed to a growth in the average CPM across 2008 and continuing on an upwards scale through 2011, additional increase in global broadband usage has pointed to increased search usage. CPM growth through 2008 is estimated to increase ahead of the market rate of broadband usage and consumer internet spend, continuing to capture the ever decreasing newspaper publication spend.

2008 will show Online Travel Agents continuing to face problems of a maturing market but its not all doom and gloom!, persuing growth in the Asian market may well be the best bet for those companies able to master global growth and global market demand. Positioning the company for global growth was one of the pre-requisites we outlined at the development outset, allowing us to seamlessly transpose from one market to another and operate on a global level will give us great leverage in balancing the mature European and US Online Travel Markets against the emerging Asian market. Global growth for 2007 was 20.1%, averaged over the US (12.5%), European (20.0%) and Asian Online Travel Market (44.8%). Clearly identifying Asian as a key dominator in growth over the previous year Imran Khan and his team at JPMorgan Equity Research have shown where Online Travel Agents will be focusing their attention over the forthcoming 3-5 years.

Historically internet travel users have been savvy and of all the web markets showing clear signs of experience, understanding of the web and its ability to source the correct product or service, evidence of this was shown in a survey carried out in the US by JPMorgan stating that of people who booked online 61% sourced their final purchase after visiting 2 or more travel related websites. Allied to this they also indicated that of the people that searched for travel 81.9% of them factored price as the most important factor when making a booking decision, thus reinforcing the pointer that Internet Travel shoppers are searching a few online travel agents for the best price. A clear winner in the Online Travel battle at present is Expedia, dominating searches, bookings and visits, 37.8% of travel bookings made in the previous 12 months came via the Expedia.com website alone. Alarmingly if you add this to the groups other brands, Hotels.com and Hotwire over 70% of the participants had booked under the group in the previous 12 months, a massive market share and overwhelming evidence if you needed some that they dominate the online travel market through price, ease of use and familiarity.

It has widely been feared that as Hotel chains and Airlines develop their own websites and invest in their technology themselves that they would undoubtedly increase their market share and start capitalising on the Online travel market for themselves rather than aggregators or agents. This has for the best part been achieved to relative success with 39.9% of the respondents stating that they prefer to book the flights direct from the Airline whereas 45.3% preferred to book direct through the Hotel chain themselves. Additionally package offerings do not appear to attract the weight they used to, as clearly shown with the modest decline in package holiday bookings, savvy internet shoppers preferring to purchase flights and hotels seperately.

Emerging markets such as Social networks and increasing advertising spend point to a consistent theme of web expansion, much has been themed of the web2.0, the empowerment of the user and as such I personally do not feel this has been acheived in the best part by Online Travel Agents. Developing travel to not only offer the user their shopping needs - competitive price, large choice, travel personalisation but to also allow the user an interactive experience to attract them to the website after the booking is a difficult proposition. Indicative signs of web growth and in particular increased user activity (more page views / clicks / purchases) allow me to confidently predict an upsurge in online travel as backed by the findings of Imran Khan. Albeit a difficult proposition of marrying social networking, travel user empowerment (reviews / events / geotagging / videos) and traditional travel booking, it is one that we are looking the market to follow. Surely online travel agents will realise that there needs to be an increase in the interactive elements of their commerce websites to fight the increasing growth of price comparison websites, Airlines and Hotel Chains.

Written By James McDowall, www.off2.com/

Related Links - www.morganmarkets.com/, www.techcrunch.com/

Acknowledgments - Imran Khan, Nothing But Net, 02 January 2008

Today we launched our Corporate Travel channel, the initial interest following the first full day of marketing has overwhelmed us! With 6 scheduled meetings in the first week of January already things are looking very promising!

With an initial phase 1 target of 120 client signups over the forthcoming 3 months we are keen to start the ball rolling. Offering clients access to negotiated rates on Air / Hotel and Car plus additional concierge facilities such as restaurant and event bookings allied with our extremely competitive monthly flat rate pricing strategy we are very confident we can acheive this goal.

Should you know of anyone who has the difficult role of booking travel on behalf of their company and think they might need a helping hand please contact Harry at harry@off2.com.

James

After many mockups and designs we have finally decided on our definitive logo. The breif to the graphics designer was to create a logo which was vibrant, memorable and simplistic. We wanted the logo to represent ourselves and our ethos, to use travel as the basis and look to other web 2.0 logos for inspiration.

The new logo is shown below, we especially love it on a black background!

James

(Click to enlarge)