A travel start-up, AdventureHoney, launched in Thai beta, aims to help travellers find the honey in adventure experiences. Chief Experience Officer Chris Ball tells WIT the story behind the enterprise, which is powered by digital house and incubator Blue Chilli.

Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
.

AdventureHoney: where real travellers find and book tours and activities direct with licensed operators. We provide a safe, cost effective, socially responsible way to book adventure experiences.

Q: Who are your key customers?

Global Experience Seeker: 22-40 years old, probably not married but, if so then ‘double income no kids.’ Educated, middle/upper income, living close to city and all basic needs met. They now yearn to learn about themselves and about the world.

 Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?

We are critically different to existing operators in several key areas, but I suspect we’ll be put into a similar box as, for example: Viator, Urban Adventures, Isango, GetYourGuide and to a lesser degree: an Intrepid or Peregrine.

Hopefully people will compare us to something between the above mentioned and a highly focused digital version of Lonely Planet for cool stuff to do. Unlike Lonely Planet, our content is in real time, curated by our users and has a booking engine on the backend.

Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?

Finding and booking the kinds of travel experiences you’ll want to share with your grandchildren.

Most of us are trying to find cool things to do when we travel, right? Booking flights, accommodation, rental cars, cruises is easy. But, where do we go if we want to find an adventure? Wait until we get there and hope we stumble on it? There has to be a less risky, more engaging way to book cool adventure experiences. We aim to provide it.

Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Self funded.

 Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?

Both.

Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?

20% clip on each transaction. Free for the traveller, cost of acquiring business for the operator.

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

One thing that’s great about AdventureHoney is its niche focus. Short, authentic adventure tours and activities in developing countries

We’re still several months away from proof of concept where we can say “look, if we raise $X we can achieve Y.” But we will get there.

In a macro sense, our focus is the developing world where Internet connectivity growth is at double/triple digits. Not only is the developing world home to some of the greatest adventures, it’s also a market underserved by online providers and with great upside.

Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

Strengths:

-Niche focus on adventure.

-Model permits less sophisticated operators to market online and capture new business without access to Internet.

-Social business leveraging travel to make the destinations we touch better than when we found them.

-Connect traveller direct to operator, therefore cost neutral for customer

-Free for operator to market experiences (only pay when matched with a booking)

-Safety for consumer (money back guarantee, licensed operators only)

-Deep market of global experience seekers.

Weaknesses:

-The nature of the tour/activity purchase isn’t always conducive to an online marketplace.

-Irregular purchase patterns from consumers in this space and lack of loyalty — –

-Crowded market with a low barriers to entry and a lot of investment in space – from the bigger players to the 2-3 man teams in a garage.

Opportunities:

–Solve some of the things that have historically made tours & activities tough to sell online.

-Host of different service extensions and even pivots I see for this space – both vertically and horizontally. Tell you about those when and if they become real 😉

Threats:

–There’s more complexity to the solution than is apparent from the outside looking in. Getting swept up in complexity and not maintaining a clear focus will be terminal.

-That we run out of money and energy before we crack it (unlikely!)

-Aside from that, there are always the high level threats that are out of our control. For example: terrorism, another SARS like epidemic, civil unrest in destination, recession, oil shocks…alien invasion or Mayan apocalypse!

Q: Who are the team members and advisors? 

Chris Ball: Co-Founder & CEO

Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin: Technical Co-Founder

We have several very important advisors from within and outside the industry.

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

Chris: Has started and worked in startups from retail to finance and banking. From leading a national sales team at 23 to transacting millions in commercial real estate, Chris is an elite performer. He’s also an adventure junkie having embarked on some extraordinary adventures in over 50 countries and 6 continents.

Sebastien: The kind of guy that at 30, appears to have lived several lives. Ex Navy, 3 x 30 under 30 winner, top UNSW postgrad, IEAUST Engineer of the year, Founded several of his own startups. The latest of which is BlueChilli. BlueChilli is a venture technology firm, which rather than capital invests technology into startups.

Seb is an adventurer at heart. From carving single tracks on his beloved Cananondale MTB to popping 20 foot airs on his kite board – Seb gets it.

Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?

Changing the world in some small way for the better.

Experiences are more rewarding than stuff.

We want to help people find experiences, which help them learn about themselves and the world around them.

We also wanted to create something that would, even if only in some small way, help travellers be the change they want to see in the world. Through the Changemaker Program, we leverage our users travel spend to empower local entrepreneurs with social business ideas that can lift communities out of extreme poverty.

Chris doing deep water soloing (one of the experienceslisted in Adventure Honey) – you free climb up the limestone karst before kicking out and free falling from as high  as 20 metres back down into the ocean below.