Specialist adventure travel, media and lifestyle platform
Business overview
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.muchbetteradventures.com |
| Sectors | Travel, Leisure & Sport Digital B2C |
| Company number | 06916506 |
| Incorporation date | 27 May 2009 |
Business highlights
- Award-winning adventures in 46 countries
- Sales accelerating fast, back to £1.08m in Feb/March 2021
- £6 return on every £1 marketing spend in Q1 2021
- On a mission to be the global leading brand for a $683bn+ market
Key features
Learn more about convertible campaigns.
Idea
Introduction
Much Better Adventures is a specialist adventure travel, media and lifestyle platform built for the time-poor, experience-hungry millennial generation.
We exist to inspire lives filled with adventure, and protect the world's wild places.
Whether it’s a quick weekend or an epic expedition, our curated collection of award-winning adventures span 46 countries and counting. They’re led by carefully selected local hosts and run exclusively for our passionate community.
Our proprietary in-house platform automates the entire booking flow - we’ve replaced the traditional tour operator or agency with a more cost-efficient and scalable model.
Our media arm produces inspirational, practical and award-winning content, fuelling rapid growth in our audience and opening up additional revenue opportunities.
Adventure travel is a $683bn market. We’re building UK market leadership, but 35% of our users are organically coming from international markets - there's a global opportunity ahead of us.
Substantial accomplishments to date
We’re proudly part-community owned. Three successive raises have been oversubscribed, helping us fuel our mission to build the world’s most positive impact adventure company.
Here’s the story so far:
2016
- Launched our first ‘Epic Weekend’ adventures
- Voted UK’s ‘Best for Experiences’
2017-2019
- Launched our first ‘Big Adventures’
- Voted UK’s ‘Young Travel Entrepreneurs of the Year’
- Raised £2.5m in two oversubscribed funding rounds
- Grew adventure revenues 148% in 2019 - sales of £3.7m
2020
- Grew revenues 187% year on year for 6 months to Feb 2020 - sales of £1.24m in Jan/Feb 2020
- Rated ‘a travel company you can trust’ by Which? for our response to Covid-19
- Raised over £20,000 in aid for 190 of our worst affected local hosts and their families
- Hired Tanya, former Head of Adventure at Airbnb to lead US growth
- Launched Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency and became the first travel company to release a carbon label for all trips
- Organic traffic grew 120%, and we reached 1.4m total users
2021
- Sales accelerating fast, back to £1.08m in Feb/March 2021
- £5.93 return on every £1 marketing spend in Q1 2021
Post-Covid, we expect a boom in demand, and believe we’re perfectly positioned to capitalise on that.
The bigger we get, the more good we can do. Our model ensures 75p in every £1 spent goes directly to locally owned businesses, compared to a mass tourism average of 5p. Another 5% of our revenues are ring-fenced for reforestation and rewilding.
Monetisation strategy
Our primary revenue stream is commission on bookings. Our agreements with hosts mean the more people in a group, the higher commission we earn.
Average revenues per booking have grown from £99 in 2018 to £192 in Q1 2021.
Meanwhile our spend to acquire a new booking has fallen from £96 in 2018 to just £32 in Q1 2021 - a 6x return for every £1 spent on marketing.
This is due to effective social media advertising and growth in organic (free) traffic from search engines, repeat bookings, word of mouth, PR and partnerships.
We have the potential for additional revenue streams from add-on sales (e.g. insurance, pre-trip accommodation, flights) and via our media/events arm (e.g. sponsorship, subscription and affiliate). Recent brand partners already include Helly Hansen and O2.
Use of proceeds
We’re aiming to raise our Series A this year to take full advantage of the pent up demand out there. We're raising £1m on advanced subscription agreements now, with £4m+ to follow. Funds will be used to accelerate key areas of our growth strategy:
- Expanding and diversifying our range of trips worldwide
- Growing and inspiring our audience by scaling up our media arm across online and print magazine, video, podcast and books, along with regular community events and meet-ups
- Organically growing our customer base in international markets like the US
We will have the ability to move towards profitability post-Series A, as well as the option of a Series B to accelerate our international growth and expand additional revenue streams.
We believe the combination of our tech-led platform model, diversified revenues and mission-led, highly focused and differentiated brand gives us a strong competitive advantage and source of value for future investors or acquirers.
Key Information
The company has one £50,000 Bounceback loan at an interest rate of 2.5% per annum starting from September 2021. The loan is due to be repaid September 2026.
The funds raised from this investment round will not be used to repay these loans.
Advance Subscription Agreement
This investment round is being raised by way of a convertible equity investment structure, in this case an "advanced subscription agreement".
The key terms that apply to the Company’s advanced subscription agreement are set out below. See also attached Key Terms document for further details.
- Discount – conversion at a 20% discount to the valuation set by a Trigger Event.
- Valuation cap of:
(i) In the event of a Qualifying Equity Fundraise, £20,000,000 with the Discount.
(ii) In the event of conversion on Sale or Listing, the Longstop Date, or a Winding-Up Event, £14,000,000 with no Discount.
Conversion is triggered by ("Trigger Events"):
- An Equity Fundraise – defined as the Company raising investment capital of at least £2,000,000 from one transaction or a series of transactions, in exchange for the company issuing of ordinary shares;
- A Change of Control where a transaction or series of transactions where the sale of any of the shares in the capital of the Company would result in the purchaser (or anyone acting in concert with the purchaser) acquiring a controlling interest in the Company;
- An IPO – being a listing of the company’s shares on a recognised stock market or secondary market.
- Longstop Date is 15 months from the date of the advance subscription agreement.
If conversion has not been triggered by the Longstop Date shares will be issued on the longstop date at the Default Share Price, which is a price per share determined by dividing an amount equal to the higher of:
(i) £8,500,000 and
(ii) two times the Company’s annualised sales (as calculated using the sales for the last three completed calendar months prior to the Longstop Date derived from theCompany’s accounting records) by the fully diluted share capital at the Longstop Date
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