As part of the WiT Startup Spotlight series, we go to Madrid this week to speak to Smartvel, which was launched in 2013 with the idea of providing destination content to travel brands to help them enhance their sales. In total, it’s raised £3 million and is looking to expand globally.
Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph.
Smartvel provides destination content solutions to the top players in the tourism industry (Airlines, Tourism Bureaus, Hotel Chains, OTAs, etc.) with the aim of improving its digital touchpoints and providing a better customer experience to their travellers through all the stages of the customer journey.
Our proprietary technology, based on big data, is capable of gathering all the live content of any destination in the world: top sights and attractions, up-to-date events, restaurants, hotels, concerts, exhibitions, trade fairs, and all the personalised layers of content that you want to enhance (ancillaries, recommendations, partnerships with tours & activities, rent-a-cars, transfers, etc.).
The content generated can be displayed through user-friendly interfaces, such as our already developed Trip Planner and content widgets, or chatbot. Additionally, for clients that already have their own interfaces and only wish to integrate the content, Smartvel offers access to its events API. We currently cover more than 300 destinations in 15 different languages.
Who are your key customers?
We are already working with companies such as Singapore Airlines, LATAM Airlines, the City of Buenos Aires, Iberia Airlines, Iberostar Hotels, RIU Hotels, Meliá, and many others.
Who are your key partners?
We have a reseller partnership model and we have many freelance salespeople working with Smartvel worldwide, which are essentially our sales network. We have also some strategic partnerships with companies such as Vodafone or Indra, who are interested in our solution and sell it to their own clients within the travel industry. These are especially interesting partnerships for us because they are big corporations with capacity to sell or a very attractive client portfolio already.
What business are you most likely to be compared to?
We have very few direct competitors worldwide, companies that we could definitely relate to, but we still say that nobody is doing exactly what we do.
Our differentiation point is clearly our technology, we have won the first prize in Spain for the best project in Big Data & Tourism, and we are also very proud of our AI & machine learning side with deep technology that can generate, automatically, the live agenda of the destinations. This is clearly different and unique. We’ve invested more than 80,000 hours of programming in our platform, and this is paying out now.
What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
In the era of information overload, where content is king but users are not willing to pay for it, Smartvel has developed a unique technology to improve all the digital touchpoints for top players in the travel industry (Singapore Airlines, Iberostar, City of Buenos Aires, LATAM…).
The digital world has changed how companies interact and retain their customers and leads. As touchpoints, we understand those moments where the company interacts with its clients, the moments of truth. Smartvel delivers a complete solution for all sales channels with the aim of offering a unique brand experience contributing to the digital transformation of those moments, improving some and creating new ones.
The digital world has changed how companies interact and retain their customers and leads. As touchpoints, we understand those moments where the company interacts with its clients, the moments of truth. Smartvel delivers a complete solution for all sales channels with the aim of offering a unique brand experience contributing to the digital transformation of those moments, improving some and creating new ones.
What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
Our strategic partners like Indra or Vodafone, which are big corporations, develop integral projects and solutions for their customers at a much bigger level. They have areas focused exclusively in tourism and digital solutions where we are a great fit for them, since we develop a very specific niche solution that covers content, which is nowadays key for their travel customers.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Since Smartvel was founded in 2013, we have closed a couple of investment rounds thanks to the support of companies such as Alsa, La Caixa and SEGITTUR, as well as other private investors that have been incorporated into the project. Last September, we closed the second round of investment. Counting all sources of financing (public and private), the total funds have been around €3 million.
What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
The company has reached positive EBITDA in 2018, growing at a ratio of 3x on ARR (Annual Recurrent Revenue). We are also expanding our solutions worldwide thanks to the funding round we close this year.
What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
With the desire for “experiential travel” and digitalization, travel companies are rethinking the way they approach their customers. There is a lot of potential behind our technology because content and personalisation is something that travel companies are already working on in order to enrich their travellers’ experience and be more present throughout the customer journey. However, if they wanted to develop a solution themselves they would need to spend many years and a lot of money to do so. This is where we see opportunity and scalability. Our technology is very sophisticated and exclusive, it is our differentiation versus other suppliers, and it is very scalable in terms of new destinations and also other areas.
Our challenge now is undoubtedly the scalability of the business, the ability to maintain a sustained growth over time. 2018 was a very encouraging year as we closed our second round of investment and incorporated clients from LATAM Airlines, RIU, Singapore Airlines, Globalia, Iberostar, Iberia, Nautalia or Mahou among others. Therefore, our challenge now is to be able to maintain that traction over time and get more international visibility to continue growing, mainly focusing on APAC and USA markets. There are still many potential customers out there.
Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Strengths
- Talented Team
- Product differentiation
- Technology advantage
- Business relationships
- Investors support and good finance: positive EBITDA in 2018, growing at a ratio of x3 on ARR
- Positive feedback from our customers
- Very few direct competitors focusing on the same, and there isn’t nearly any or any competitor with such an advanced technology.
- Scalable business and technology – Tourism is key and there are still many travel companies which are potential customers for us.
Weaknesses
- It is not easy to measure the impact of our solution in ROI, conversion rate or user engagement.
- Although nowadays content is becoming more and more important, our solution it is a nice-to-have, not a priority for our potential customers.
- During setup phase, our integration is very quick, but development teams within in clients are often focused in other key areas of the business so it is hard to prioritize the project internally.
Opportunities
- Other segments which are outside travel and tourism that are also interested in content (Mahou for instance, is one of our clients and it is the biggest beer company in Spain who is currently helping their users discover everything there is to experience in the cities thanks to smartvel up-to-date content)
- More strategic partnerships that can help us scale faster
Threats
- Pseudo-competitors or apps with similar focus, curated content and good UX.
Who are the team members and advisors?
In Madrid HQs we are around 24 people working distributed in different areas: Engineering, Operations, Business Development and Marketing, and Finance. Considering also our sales network, made up largely of professionals with years of experience in the industry who work on their own in other parts of the world, we can add another 15 people who are helping us to sell and make the brand visible at an international level in Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Zurich, Dubai, Delhi, Chile, Brazil, London, Colombia, and more.
Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
We are a group of professionals, with different backgrounds and interests but passionate about what we do and with a clear goal in mind, which is to make Smartvel even bigger. We have been working for 5 years in this company, and we have gone through a lot, sometimes difficult moments which have made us stronger. But here we are, in 2019 having had the best 12 months ever. We recently closed an investment round and with very well known clients who trust in what we do so this gives us strength and trust in the project and with our team.
Moreover, from a product perspective, Smartvel’s technology has been entirely developed by a group of Spanish engineers, and it has taken around 100,000 hours in development. This has been possible because of the fact that we have great professionals at a national level.
