Starting point: Away wants to simplify travel booking in a one-stop shop

What’s your 30-second pitch for investors?

We combine travel and technology to disrupt and transform the travel industry by building a unique platform that dynamically creates the best holiday packages including flights, hotels, insurance and transfers. Away saves consumers time, energy, money and, most importantly, stress – and eliminates the need for travel agents.

Our trip maker lets you create your own itinerary, allowing you to mix and match airlines, stay in multiple destinations and add transfers, activities or insurance. Pre-trip cancellation insurance is already included free of charge for your peace of mind. Our bundled holiday approach gives us access to special rates and discounts, ensuring the more you add, the more you save.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Away uses proprietary technology to combine millions of flight and hotel deals, dynamically combining them and providing users with personalized recommendations based on the individual’s preferred travel dates, destinations and budget. At its core sits a proprietary price cache that refreshes every four hours, allowing customers to access prices 360 days ahead until the famous spinning wheel stops. AI algorithms provide personalized results and simplify the decision-making process.

Our Travel View allows the customer to tailor their vacation to their needs, including changing flights to their preferred airline, increasing time at their destination, upgrading and including their room, adding multiple stops or creating a 21-day dream trip in Europe.

Give us a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths – Unique user experience; Modern, flexible technology; Strong travel industry experience and relationships.
• Weaknesses – Limited budget and small team without large development and marketing budgets of established players.
• Opportunities – With a travel agent network much smaller than pre-Covid and a consumer that has learned to shop online and an industry that hasn’t changed much in the past decade, there is ample opportunity to leverage e-commerce best practices to deliver to consumers. Better experience and achieve higher margins.
• Threats – The current economic and investor uncertainty increases the risk of not growing fast enough.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from a customer and industry perspective?

The holiday booking process is fundamentally broken, and hasn’t changed in over a decade. You’ll wade through endless tabs and spend hours comparing flights, hotels and prices – or engage a travel agent.

Our focus is primarily on solving customer pain points and establishing a B2C platform.

We have created a one-stop booking shop where all your travel needs can be met with a simple and seamless online booking process. We take the hassle out of comparing prices across multiple tabs, websites and providers and enable people to save time and money while enjoying a personalized holiday booking experience.

We are also looking at B2B opportunities, both within and outside the travel industry. Our platform enables existing players to offer a unique holiday booking platform and other brands to travel. Away frees up time for travel agents, allowing them to focus their resources on delivering real value to their customers.

So you’ve got the product, now how do you get more customers?

We are at the beginning of our journey and focus on creating awareness through smart marketing, social media and PR. We are actively looking at potential partnerships and collaborations with other brands, including the possibility of white-labeling our solution for other travel and travel brands.

Tell us what process you went through to establish a real need and achievable market size for your company.

Consumer insights tell us that people are ready to travel again and are looking to regain trust in travel providers to maintain confidence. This, coupled with the fact that people are getting busier and the cost of living is rising, means that consumers are looking for services that work for them and meet their individual needs. This gives us a great opportunity to engage tech-savvy young professionals and travelers across Australia.

Against this background is the fact that a large percentage of Australian travelers still turn to retail travel agents to plan their vacations. Away has created an opportunity for these travelers to solve the problems they are seeing solved online.

How and when will you make money?

We create a loyal community of like-minded travelers by offering unique and unique online and offline experiences. To manage margin at a sub-component level, we apply a modern, AI-based revenue management logic that enables us to achieve industry-leading margins. By dynamically combining flights and hotels, we demystify underlying prices, enabling our content partners to drive price comparisons and offer great value for money while eliminating excess inventory.

We expect to break even within the first year of operations.

What is the background and previous achievements of the founding team?

The founding team has extensive expertise in the travel, technology and retail industries and a proven track record of establishing successful startups. The platform’s co-founders include Cameron Holland, former CEO of Luxury Escapes, and David Gold and Marco Vetter. David was an early investor in companies such as Aconex and Redbubble and former chairman of Luxury Escapes. Marco has held a number of senior positions in airlines and aviation management consultancy in Europe and Australia, as well as retail companies such as Myer and Michael Hill.

How do you address diversity and inclusion in your business?

We have no specific disclosures, policies or partnerships at this stage. Instead, we live every day in a multi-ethnic society more or less around the world, with a healthy female/male mix and a very flexible work environment so that everyone can balance their personal situation with work. As we grow, we plan to formalize these additions and pursue unique partnerships that align with our brand values.

What has been the hardest part of setting up the business so far?

Like most startups, it’s about getting the vision straight and finding the time and effort it takes to get there. Startups aren’t sitting on a mountain of cash so spending is critical, but so is productivity. Especially in travel, technology barriers to entry are very high.

Generally speaking, travel startups have a tough time making an impact – so why get lucky?

Our product combined with our passion and experience in travel has allowed us to create a new approach that puts customers first. It takes time to educate consumers on the benefits of Awai, but we strongly believe that once customers experience our product, we can create long-lasting, loyal customer relationships.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We’ll have more destinations in the game, exclusive hotel and airline deals and even more exclusive offers.

What is your last game? (Going public, getting, growing and going private, etc.)

Ultimately, we want to provide a better experience for our customers. In the long run, this can best be achieved by partnering with an existing brand or going public.