WHEN we spoke to DayAway founder Martha Waslen in April, the startup had just closed a successful seed funding round and brought onboard its only other employee. Since then, the team has grown to 25 members (a mix of employees and contractors) and expects to close a Series A capital raise by the end of this year.
At the WiT Travel Roadshow Episode 4, we caught up with the entrepreneur to hear more about what she thinks sets DayAway apart, and why she thought this would be a good time to launch a travel startup.
Entering the industry just when OTAs are getting squeezed out might seem like questionable wisdom, but Waslen sees it instead as a competitive advantage, saying “for us, there is no pre-Covid, there’s just now and there’s just what’s coming next.”
Not having preconceived notions about how things should be was “an advantage in that we can talk to the hotels, we can see what their needs are, we can gather all this community feedback, and we can start to build our platform,” she continues.
On top of an unusual origin story, DayAway is going against the grain in other ways too.
For starters, they are not operating on a commission model. Instead, hotels pay a monthly subscription to be on the platform which means that “we’re not overburdened by who owns the guest,” Waslen explains, convinced that a commission model would set a ceiling on the relationship between DayAway and partners and ultimately result in a misalignment when the ownership of the guest was at stake.
Another thing the startup is doing, is zealously staying in its lane. Resisting the urge to move into other services, Waslen wants to provide only high value property-oriented experiences on the DayAway platform.
She elaborates, “We’re far more interested in building tech that is so automated, and so usable, and so scalable for these hotels that it really solves their tech challenges. And then bring those experiences that happen off property into the hotel ecosystem. So, a hotel can now be the destination for museum tours, heritage cooking classes, around-the-city bike tours of downtown, they can own that experience.”
It’s a strategy she believes is reassuring to the properties she hopes to work with, especially in the luxury segment, where hotels are notoriously protective of their brand. Waslen shares that the most consistent questions she was asked centred around who DayAway would market to and the kind of demographic that it would attract.
The luxury market is one she knows well, since she started her career at Ralph Lauren in 2006, and weathered the GFC there.
Her experience there is part of the reason for her conviction now, Waslen says, because she saw the luxury market segment bounce back very quickly from the recession, recalling “people weren’t buying less, they weren’t buying down. They were buying differently, but perceived value was still very important in investing in luxury.”
It’s an insight she believes is transferable to travel and hospitality, observing “people, especially living in Singapore, who place such a premium on travel and international experience, didn’t just stop going to hotels, they wanted to do staycations. And in between staycations they want to do day-cations, they really want to engage with their favourite hotel brands, they want to spend time on property, and they see a lot of value in that experience and that perceived luxury. So, it’s interesting to see that they don’t want to navigate away from hotels, they don’t find hotels irrelevant. They just need to find new ways to interact.”
And the feedback Waslen is receiving suggests that the trend is not isolated to Singapore either.
With luxury travel likely to see an early recovery, Waslen has her sights on immediate global expansion. DayAway is currently in conversations with hotel groups in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, London and New York, and will be announcing their next market before September.
As to other plans for the future, DayAway is launching an editorial channel which will make the startup “a fully, vertically integrated experiential marketplace platform, from content and social marketing all the way through booking conversion”.
Meanwhile, Waslen is also exploiting the flexibility of the platform to carry out extensive testing, and to stay responsive to constantly shifting demand. Right now, she says, experiences around engagement, connection, and reunion are receiving the best responses, while any kind of “work from the lobby” experience, just wasn’t special enough, and has been taken off the platform.
With all the success she’s had launching during the pandemic, is Waslen concerned that when travel comes back, DayAway’s model will lose its lustre?
Quite the opposite. Since the platform was built to shine a spotlight on underutilised and ancillary spaces, she says even when international travel returns, guests can still stay at a hotel of their choosing, and then use DayAway to enrich their stay by enjoying curated experiences at other properties, in a way allowing hotels to “take back market share from these experiential marketplaces [that had previously] taken that experience off the hotel property.”
• Featured image credit: DayAway
