Travelling with your friends.Easy. Fun. Cheap.

Holidays with your friends made easy: Social planning process, trip sharing, cheaper group rates and exclusive deals

●Agenda

● The Big Idea● Target Market● Existing Competitors● Marketing Strategy

● Channel Partnerships● Smart Device Segment● Tests and conclusions

●The Big Idea

Organising a holidays with your friends is often a nightmare.

Sms, mail, pub nights, maybe a Facebook group are just the best way to collect a lot of disorganized information and you end up finding it too hard to understand the options liked by everybody.

And, when you finally get the crew together, why you should pay the same price as you'd be travelling alone? You think you deserve a discount for a 8 persons booking! We think the same.

●The Big Idea

In GroupDealTravel you can:

- Login and Create a trip- Invite friends to the trip- Insert the date, destination, budget, kind of trip… Or if youare not sure. Organize in 5 seconds a polls to share thedecision with your friends- Everybody can access the hotels and itinerary list andselect proposals. people can like the proposals, comment,or ....dislike them!- Access to amazing group deals based on your inputs andFacebook profile.- Easy planning process, a trip everybody like, and savemoney for group deals.

●Target Market

GroupDealTravel User (initial target):- Men and Women- Aged between 18 and 40 years old- Single or Married but without children- Living in Western Europe- Spending on average USD 2000 per year on holiday* - Going on average 2 times per year on a group holiday with their - friends*- Whose group trips usually consist of city breaks or sports/ski trips in Europe*- Having access to internet and using online travel websites to book their holidays*Source: GroupDealTravel online survey

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 ● Existing competitors

●Marketing Strategy

The Marketing Strategy of GroupDealTravel consists of:

● Channel Partnerships● Exchanging traffic with websites that could be used by

GroupDealTravel potential users and that have moderate growth ● Examples: Myfriendshotel, Busabout, Wimdu…

● Smart Device platform● Taking advantage of the growth of mobile travel bookings● Taking the lead on travel applications for Windows phone

● Online advertising ● Leveraging on Social Networks (events targeted advertising)● Google Ad Words

●Channel Partnerships

We use channel partnerships to exchange users traffic through recommendation/ advertising with other websites that people use when planning a group trip.

These websites include:

●Airlines, train and bus companies

●Travel guides

●Flat rental agencies

●Travel insurance companies

●Channel Partnerships

.

We classified the potential channel partners according to potential benefit/ feasibility in the table below. We focus for our marketing strategy on the potential partners listed in the boxes on the right hand side.

● Clearly, mobile is a channel with huge potential, but mobile travel booking significantly lags behind mobile travel research. eMarketer expects the gap to narrow slightly by 2016, but the number of actual bookers still will be only half that of travel researchers. The smart devices shipments are expected to pass from the 1000M to 1900M within the 2016, so the presence and support for that Media is clearly on the top priorities of Group Deal Travel team.

● The Group and travel mission is making different considerations on the way to land on the different ecosystems.

● The App need to be fully integrated with Social Network platforms and other applications/partners already present on the network.

● The Smart Devices Segment

● Online advertising - Tests

● Market test 1: Ad Words

● Market Test 1: Ad WordsTesting 18-30 years segment for specific activities

Group Planner or Trips Deals emphasys

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)

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. Shall we focus on this?H2: Group Deal, putting emphasis on best deals?H3: Travel Planner, putting emphasis on best planner tool?

Ad1 was published 9.099 times and clicked 3 times.(K: planning trip)Ad2 was published 3.026 times and clicked 4 times.(K: deals for travel, trip deals, deals travel)Ad3 was published 1.387 times and clicked 6 times.(K: deal travel, travel deals to, travel deal with)The campaigns have not underlined special predilections by users, but the “deals“ concept has been reinforced by its occurrence as keyword and in Landing page usage.

● Market Test 1: Ad Words (results)Group Planner or Tris Deals emphasys

***We received an excellent response regarding a specific part of our proposition ("deals"). Those users browsed pages through the web site (although not leaving an email address, part more focused on planning). CTR is high (0.85€), and implies this a viable solution only when a high rate of high-fees booking is reached (we need to work on partnerships)

*** Regarding the trip planner part we received low traffic, with no customer subscription to the platform. Although the budget for this kind of campaign was very low and the landing page probably still too basic , it helped to find interesting insights from this experiment. It seems that, despite people might like social trip planning, they are not really looking for it (in the same way nobody was looking for twitter or Pinterest). We consider the option Google ads might not be the best way to market this functionality. Trip planning/sharing can be a powerful tool for customer retention and booking channel, but probably it's more compatible with social recommendation campaigns(viral). A strategy on this point is under study, and we are trying to identify niche markets from where to start our next campaigns.

● Market Test 2: Facebook Campaign

We did two online campaigns on Facebook with a budget of £5 per day:

●Men and Women between 18 and 40 years old living in the United Kingdom. The campaign covered 23m potential users.

●Men and Women between 18 and 40 years old living in Western Europe and like Travel(10M potential users).

*** Facebook ads are notoriously less clicked than google's ones, explained by the fact people in facebook are not "looking for something" but are in more 'passive mode'. Anyway, although until now it was impossible to estimate the benefits of Facebook ads for customer acquisition (no clicks), it remains a good candidate to help us building the brand. We are now studying a campaign focused on getting people's "likes" rather than access to the website.