Travellers with world’s first platform for flight-free holidays are never alone with WhatsApp
It’s midday and hot; you’ve missed your train from a station in a remote part of Spain. You’re worried. Who are you going to call? If you are a customer of Byway, the world’s first platform for flight-free holidays, the answer will be only a WhatsApp message away.
Byway founder Cat Jones set up a WhatsApp group to address situations like missed trains to enable her to tell clients that there would be another train in an hour. “They can go away and have an ice cream and relax, all part of slow travel,” she says. “Our team supports travellers on WhatsApp throughout their trip.”
And it’s not just missed train or ferry connections that keep customers close to Byway. WhatsApp messages, available 24/7, offer advice on weather conditions, where to find a cool café or a boutique hotel, and many other suggestions to enhance the clients’ holiday experience. In turn, travellers send feedback on their holidays, with tips and videos, allowing Byway to build its knowledge bank of destinations and pass it on to clients.
“These tips make Byway trips better with every slow travel tale, as we continually expand the recommendations in our itineraries,” Jones says. With a background in technology, Jones launched Byway in 2021 to focus on slow travel experiences by train, boat, bus and bike. She previously worked for a venture capital firm investing in businesses across travel. Two things swayed her decision to go out on her own. The “rising tide” of consumer awareness of sustainable travel – and the Covid pandemic, which changed the way people worked, giving them the flexibility to combine holiday with work.
Byway began by offering trips around the UK and has extended its reach further into in Europe. Demand from long-haul international clients is growing as Byway offers an option for train travel over short-haul flights in Europe. In this, it is being helped by a recent decision in France to ban short-haul flights where train services operate between the same cities.
Cat Jones: “For slow travel the mindset must be how you travel, not so much how long you travel,”
As well, Europe’s sleeper trains, which once epitomised the romance of rail travel, are on the way back, allowing travellers to go to sleep in one European country and wake up in another.
Byway, recently certified as a B Corp organisation, has also launched 100% vegan flight-free holidays.
Jones’ recent four-week family holiday through the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Italy allowed her “to do a little bit of work” while travelling on the Eurostar to Amsterdam and then to Zurich on an overnight sleeper train. She managed another three days’ work while staying at Lake Como. “For slow travel the mindset must be how you travel, not so much how long you travel,” Jones says. “The travel element should be part of the holiday.”
Slow travel, she adds, embraces the unexpected and is opportunistic which makes it is important to have a personalised service like the Byway WhatsApp. The company builds its own packages and adds a small premium for customers for the convenience of its WhatsApp service.
Since travelling as a child with her parents on train, boat and bike holidays in the UK, Jones – who doesn’t have a car – has believed travelling through the world is better than flying over it, a belief obviously shared by her growing of number clients who are mainly of in the mid-20s up to pre-retirement age (although one return customer is 99 years old ) and who able to split their work week with downtime.
Byway now has its own bespoke system with raw feeds from transport companies and accommodation providers to overcome the previous complexities in booking train and ferry travel. “There’s an extraordinary amount of complexity for individuals to understand when booking multi-modal trips,” says Jones. When you’re travelling on these multimodal trips, if you’re taking 16 different connections on trains, and boats and buses, one of them is probably going to run late, maybe more than one of them is going to run late. So, knowing that you’ve got the flexibility in your itinerary, that’s important.”
A dynamic trip builder allows travellers to put in their preferences, after which Byway presents travellers with smorgasbord of fully flexible options to generate a trip. That flexibility allows clients to make last-minute decisions on their travel plans. “Often, it’s just about how your day pans out, seeing how you feel, checking the weather, whether you arrived late the previous night. Then you decide what you’re doing that day,” Jones says.
“We’re optimising for enjoyment, not for speed or cost. Our mission is to make slow travel mainstream. We want this to be the way everybody travels.”
And Jones’s final words for those eyeing a slow travel journey: “Plan for enjoyment, not martyrdom.”
