Gateway Villa Rentals

Idea

Introduction

Gateway is striving to become the world's leading platform for luxury villa rentals by capitalising on an industry worth $15bn a year. We aim to achieve this by offering unrivalled customer service, with benefits such as our 'Villa Finder Service' and The Gateway Promise - ensuring that all our customers feel valued.

With an initial focus on Asia, our ever-expanding portfolio, now includes over 400 luxury high-end villas. Through our incredibly intuitive and stunning platform, clients are able to check availability in real time and instantly book one of our breath-taking villas.

The standard business model for villa rentals is well established and has already proven to be extremely profitable. With the introduction of the sharing economy into our model, we are excited to transform the travel industry and make the luxury villa market more accessible and sociable than ever before!

With an incredibly passionate and motivated team, Gateway is ready to open up new streams of growth and disrupt the luxury travel industry forever.

Intended impact

Through the creation of week-long events, Gateway will leverage the power of the sharing economy to connect individuals from all over the world - making solo travel a thing of the past.

Travellers will have the ability to book a room in one of our stunning villas and get the chance to share these properties with likeminded people from all around the world – allowing them to make new friends and lifelong connections in a luxurious setting.

By connecting likeminded individuals through the data they share with us, we hope to bring people together like never seen before and solve one of the biggest challenges of solo travel – meeting new people.

With many of our villas being in close proximity to China, we are also focusing on the Chinese outbound travel industry. Currently villa owners are missing out on an industry worth $261bn a year as 80% of Chinese tourists only use high street agencies to book their holidays. By partnering with these agencies, we want to become the gateway between villa owners and the largest outbound travel market in the world.

Substantial accomplishments to date

In the short space of 9 months we have built the business from just an idea/concept to a fully functioning platform, ready for global scalability.

August 2018: Founded Gateway Villa Rentals.
September 2018: Secured contracts to market our first 50 villas in Thailand, started development of the platform late September.
October 2018: Secured contracts for 150 more villas across Thailand and Bali.
November 2018: Visited Hong Kong on a market research task to gain more insight into the Chinese travel industry. Met with multiple agencies such as Westminster Travel Limited, Hip Holiday and Morning Star Travel. Agreed terms for potential partnerships on completion of ‘Agency Hub’.
December 2018: Agreed contracts with villa owners across The Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka bringing our collection of villas to over 400 in 6 different locations across Asia.
February 2019: Finished development of the Gateway platform. A high end luxury villa rentals platform, with real time availability where users can select their dates and book directly from the platform.
March 2019: Awarded The Leicester Startup Fund supported by Santander Universities.
May 2019: Partnered with luxury concierge brand Quintessentially Travel as their main supplier for villas in Asia.
June 2019: Received 25k investment from The Squa.re Ventures.

Monetisation strategy

Private Bookings - Individual bookings direct from our platform where we receive 10-20% commission of the total booking.

Villa Pool - Traditional commission structures will be in place with both villa owners and tour operators, we will then add an additional cost for each ticket as a service fee which will allow us to generate further revenue for putting the event together.

B2B - We are in the process of introducing tailor made motivation and reward packages for businesses to help incentivise their employees. Dependant on the type of package purchased, a service fee will be added onto the total price, ranging from 40-80% of the total booking.

Concierge Partnerships - our partner concierge services bring additional revenue, we split the commission equally with these partners.

Tour Operators - We will receive a 30-40% commission on any tours or activities booked in any of our locations. This can be for individual bookings as well as for our B2B bookings.

Use of proceeds

This investment will be used to drive growth and significantly increase brand awareness, we will allocate the funds to:.

50%, Marketing costs - with the Gateway platform already fully developed, advertisement takes a forefront for creating brand awareness and gaining new customers.
25%, Operational costs - The everyday running of the company, including sourcing new villas, new business clientele and gaining new partnerships.
25%, Development costs - Maintaining the fresh modern look of our site, ensuring it continues to work smoothly, alongside updating the tech.

This investment round will help us to gain initial traction and enable us to revolutionise the way in which people travel by creating a more social and luxurious experience by capitalising on the wealth of adventure Asia has to offer.

Gateway has no loans or debt to pay off.

Investor Perks

• £10-£500: receive 5% off of your first booking

• £500-£1,000: receive 10% off your first booking

• £1,000-£5,000: receive 15% off of your first 3 bookings

• £5,000+: receive lifetime 15% off all bookings