Meet Davinci TS, a startup that plans to remedy a big business travel pain point: group hotel reservations. It aims to help hotels save time and money while boosting occupation rates… not least, make group bookings a far more seamless process for travel organisers. WiT spoke to founder & CEO, Alex Ilyash to find out more.

Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph

Davinci TS is developing a platform for booking and management of group reservations at hotels. Estimates have shown that tour groups form a significant sector, approximately 20% of worldwide hotel bookings. But the reservation process is still usually carried out by hotels and travel agents via e-mail and phone calls, which can be often inefficient and even drag out for several weeks. Our goal is to bring the whole group booking industry into the 21st century.

Who are your key customers?

On one side, our key customers are big tour operators mainly from Asia. On the other side, there are all hotels with more than 30 rooms, such as Accor, Choice, Hilton, Scandic, etc.

Who are your key partners?

Our clients are also our key partners, as we are operating in the B2B segment.

What business are you most likely to be compared to?

We are most likely to be called as “Booking.com for B2B group accommodation”. But we are not competing with Booking.com or Expedia at all. Our competition can be only defined as DMC (destination management companies), which are providing group accommodation services manually.

What problem are you trying to solve for your customers? What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?

There is no easy way how to find a hotel for the group and easily book it. In order to find the hotel, tour operators have to google hotels, write requests, negotiate conditions and sign contracts. On the other side, hotels have the same amount of work: search for good partners and reply to hundreds of emails. Most of the time, hotels do not even want to reply to the group requests because they don’t know the tour company.

By automating an inefficient process of group reservations, we are saving time and money while increasing occupation rates of hotels. We are easily connecting them with new group booking partners all over the world. Typically, hotels are used to work with a limited number of travel companies and mostly can’t put much effort into actively seeking new partners. Our platform does that for them.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Before founding Davinci, I started, built and after a few years in business sold another company – a travel agency focused on youth trips mostly in the CEE region. I used this money to start and the first development of Davinci TS. After less than half year we got seed investment from Czech-based VC fund J&T Ventures and company Prague Boats. Currently, we are processing the next investment round with UK-based VC fund Seedcamp.

Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?

Our first validation came from customers. As I mentioned, we got our first seed investment several months after entering the market. By then we already had monthly sales in hundreds of thousands and closed deals with more than 300 hotels across 13 European countries. Right now, after 2 years of entering the market, we surpassed the milestone of 5,000 hotels in 900+ European cities. Our plan is to have 30,000 by the end of this year.

What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?

We are using a fee-model – we take a small, one-digit percentage transaction free from every successful reservation.

What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?

We believe there is a huge market opportunity. B2B group accommodation market was – and mostly still is – ignored by other big players, even though tour groups form a fifth of worldwide hotel bookings. Our goal is to become the global number one company in this market.

Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Strengths:

• We are very agile, adopting product according to the market needs all the time
• We are connecting hotels directly with tour companies, without any mediators
• Flexible price, hotels can adjust the price to different requests

Weaknesses:

• Big DMC own allocations in hotels, which can’t be sold in our platform
• Conservative market is taking time to adapt for new useful IT technologies

Opportunities:

• Standardised group booking
• Bringing the group booking process online
• Connecting customers and suppliers worldwide

Threats:

• Travel seasonality
• Big hotel chains developing their own systems

Who are the team members and advisors?

Alex Ilyash, Founder & CEO: Exited international tour company. Represented CzechTourism in India. Experience in the travel market for 7+ years.               

Gaukhar Alibayeva, Hospitality business development manager: Previously worked as Senior Hotels Coordinator in Booking.com. 8+ years in the hospitality business

Vadim Chumak, CTO: Senior architect/developer 15+ years of experience in IT.

Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?

I personally think that only new open-minded people from hotel and travel industry are able to see clearly how the travel B2B industry is out of date now, and only with the new minds we are able to make the vision happen

What’s the motivation behind doing this?

We want to change the group booking industry worldwide by connecting hotels directly with tour operators all over the world, which would enable them easy booking and management of group accommodation online.