Group Deal Travel is a social travel planning platform that allows friends to easily plan group trips together. Key features include collaborative trip planning, polling friends on dates and destinations, integrated deals and discounts for groups, and connecting to social networks and travel databases. The business aims to capitalize on the growing market of group and social travel planning by offering a dedicated platform to make the complicated logistics of planning group trips seamless. Initial funding of $50k is sought to develop the minimum viable product and validate the concept, with a second round of $300k planned for further development and marketing.

1. Group Deal Travel
Holidays with your friends made easy. Social planning process, trip
sharing, cheaper group rates and exclusive deals
Opportunity Execution Project Assignment for:
Technology Entrepreneurship Course, fall 2012
Professor Chuck Eesley, Stanford University

2. ● The Problem
● The Team
● The Product – Demo
● The Business Model
■ Market
■ Costs and Revenues
■ Risks
■ Funding
Agenda

3. We joined the course just three days before the
first big assignment (Identify the market
opportunity). During the first meeting, when
introducing ourselves to each other, we found out
we all travelled a lot, and we all experienced the
hassle in getting friends on a plane to go holidays
together. We needed to pick up an idea and that
was the deal: find a solution helping two big
passions to get together: travel and friends.
Annabelle (marketing/partnerships)
Ferran (sales/distribution)
Gianfranco (product/CEO)
The Team

4. Organising a holidays with your friends can be a nightmare. Sms, emails, phone calls, pub nights,
facebook groups...a lot of information and impossible to track who wants what and when. And wait...
no offers for groups?
Our survey shows that 92% of respondents use emails to plan their
group holidays and 67% organize face to face meetings
Are people satisfied with these planning options?
“No, it is very difficult to plan over email -
we usually end up making huge
spreadsheets and complicated documents
to track all of our traveling logistics!”
Booking travel online is Deals: no easy access Price: no easy way to
an individual process, to deal offers save money when in
not ideal for group of contextuals to group
people traveller's needs
The Problem

5. A mix of Hotel Targeted Advertisement
rooms, apartments & Group Deals. Deals
and Special group can be added to the
offers wishlist and discussed
with friends as an
option(e.g. package all
inclusive)
Hotels can be booked (onsite) or added
to the wishlist
The Solution

6. Platform is heavily
integrated with social
networks (Initially 100%
facebook)
Facebook friends can
be added and
automatically invited
through facebook APIs
Advertisement
The Solution

7. Friends can be polled to
decide date, destination
of the trip
Friends they can like or dislike
other friend's proposal
A list of things to do is
inserted and can be
updated by any of the
friends (connected to
Trip Advisor DB)
The Solution

8. The Business Model

9. The Market Size

10. The online tourism industry will experience some major trends in the coming years:
■ Mobile sales: By 2015, IDC is forecasting that mobile use will surpass traditional
desktop use within the next few years. Expedia reports that 65% of hotel bookings
within this last 24-hour window are via mobile. The smart devices shipments are expected to
pass from 1000M to 1900M in 2016,
■ Social networks: PhocusWright found that social media use among travellers is
growing far faster than the travel industry itself. Facebook users who are referred to
travel booking sites are far more likely to book travel than those who are referred via
search engines like Google("wisdom of friends”).
OUR RESEARCH
Group travelling is a segment that has been so
far neglected. Group trips are a common form
of travelling but require complicated logistics,
for which there is a growing demand. Once
thought of as a market for senior customers,
new trends are emerging like girlfriend or
sports-focused getaways. The social media
trends are making it easier to create groups
with common interests looking for custom trips
rather than the usual mass-market offers.
Growing Market

11. ● Search engines
○ Google Ad Words . We initial focus on google Adwords.
○ SEO. We will invest heavily on SEO since Q1.
● Channel Partnerships
○ Offer advanced integration functionalities to external websites in exchange of
revenue share, customer retention, traffic. We classified the potential channel
partners according to potential benefit/ feasibility. We focus startup partners
which might be interested on a partnership with GDT (Q3-Q8)
● Social recommendations
○ Customer acquisition cost is reduced drastically when one user invites
his friend to the trip planner. Product quality->Happy travellers->lower
customer acq. costs.
● Mobile
○ Taking advantage of the growth of mobile travel bookings
○ Taking the lead on travel applications for Windows phone
Marketing Strategy

12. USER ACQUISITION COST.
- Initial cost based on Google Adwords ($x10)
USER ACQUISITION COST REDUCTION
- friends invited to trips by one acquired
customer (one happy user => 3+ friends)
- Adwords optimisation(Q2)
- better SEO positioning (Q3)
- channel partnerships on place (Q3)
- Social widgets launch (Q5)
Group deal travel - Initial target user
* Men/Women
* 18-40 years old**
* No children
* Students or young professionals
* Living in US, Western and Northern Europe**
* Spending on average USD 350 per year on holiday*
* City breaks - sports/ski trips - Sun holidays.
* Online travel bookers
*Source: GroupDealTravel online survey
** Source: Facebook campaign demographics
Users

13. We did 3 online campaigns on ad words with a budget of €5 per day:
Campaigns where redirecting to Landing page. 3 hypothesis were done:
H1: Targeting special events and groups. (1K impressions, medium CTR)
H2: Group Deals (3K impressions, high CTR)
H3: Travel Planner(9K impressions, low CTR)
The campaigns have underlined a particular interest on trip planning by users,
but the “deals“ concept has been reinforced by its occurrence as keyword
and in Landing page usage and in the domain name (groupdealtravel.com)
and the application name.
CPC (cost per click) has revelled to be in the average of the publicitary compaigns in
google. CPC1 (1.06), CPC2(1.03), CPC3(0.82)
Group Planner or
Testing 18-30 years segment for Trips Deals emphasys
specific activities
Adwords campaign results

14. Demographics information from 2nd Facebook campaign:
Belgium, France and Ireland represent 83% of
the clickers (top regions correspond to the
capitals of these countries)
Domination of the 18-24 years old
category (mostly university
students or young professionals)
Facebook Campaign

15. What can we do more?
● Simplification of the booking process
● Customized search options
● Easier integration and Social App Support
● Smart devices support
● Target particular events (University trips, stag/ hen trips...)
● Partnership with existing best dealers
● Offer group discounts
● Post booking integration
Competitors

16. Partners
-> Online travel agencies
-> Tour Operator
-> Online travel aggregators
-> Services (car rental,
insurance, etc)
-> Local Activities Providers
-> Deal Aggregators/Providers
-> Tour Operator (groups)
Commissions/Fees
- Initial estimated average commissions expected
is 3%
FEE INCREMENT
- From Q2 to Q8 our commission share is going to
increase gradually until 5% (e.g. with more traffic
we can negotiate better deals. We will also start
selling exclusive deals with higher commissions)
Revenues

17. Profitability
Q3-2014
Costs and Revenues

18. ● Team Risk
● Not being able to negotiate partnerships deals and
exclusive deals (mitigate with travel expert advisors on
the board)
● Market Risk
● Big Player on Travel Market doing the same as GDT
proposition (mitigated by quicker adaptation to market)
● No interest and low attraction from end users (mitigated
by creation of social widgets/tools/product quality)
● Low barriers of entry (mitigated by brand building)
Risks

19. * Venture Capital/Angel investments
For bootstrap we are looking for an investment 50K US
$ (in Q1-Q2) assuming
-> 1st Year Salary for founders only living expenses + savings (to be paid end of year)
-> Initial product outsourced+equity
-> First employees from Q2 partially paid with equity
* Second round
For running the business in Q3-Q4 we need further
300K (sales wages, mobile development, heavy
marketing campaigns)
Funding

20. Thank You