Snaptrip

Market

Target market

As a marketplace, Snaptrip has two customers, the suppliers providing holiday rental properties to sell and the consumers that buy the last minute deals.

Holidaymakers:
The UK self catered holiday market is valued at £4.3bn. It is estimated that 34% of those holidays will be spontaneous last minute breaks and that is the core of Snaptrip's target consumer market.
The aim of Snaptrip is to service those already aiming to depart within a short time frame, but the additional aim of the brand is to create spontaneous holidays that couple, families and groups may not have planned at all, through desirable content and compelling discounts.

Suppliers:
At present Snaptrip works with large scale professional holiday rental companies, giving them valuable sales of their properties that are still available on a last minute basis. The suppliers have anything from 50 - 15,000 properties and Snaptrip aggregates their availability and pricing via technical feeds.

Characteristics of target market

Snaptrip has a team of experts collecting and analysing all the data required to determine the different types of consumers, how to acquire them, how they perform on the website, what they want to see, their average booking values, time to departures etc etc.

From the consumer side, Snaptrip has three main demographic groups, couples, families and groups.

As the company specialises in domestic, short stay holidays ranging from £150 - £6,000 the type of consumers is incredibly broad in terms of socio economic groups, with the length of stay also varying, from spontaneous weekends to two weekly summer holidays.

Other general characteristics of Snaptrip's holidaymakers include:

85% of the searches are conducted by women.
53% of the bookings have at least one pet going away with them.
52% of the bookings have children under the age of 17 travelling with them.
50% of first visits and searches are done on mobile or tablet devices but 85% of the bookings are completed on a desktop computer.

Marketing strategy

At present Snaptrip focuses on digital marketing to get awareness to new consumers but has a strong focus on retention and repeat business, hugely increasing the lifetime value of a customer.

Primarily investment goes in Google Pay Per Click advertising, as it has the ability to be incredibly targeted and as it is a digital marketing channel, detailed analysis can be done of every pound spent as the traffic flows through the website.

As Snaptrip is in its fourth trading year it is now well recognised by Google as being a specialist in last minute cottages and ranks very highly for all key terms.

In 2016 Snaptrip's average Google ranking for over 75 last minute cottage search terms was 51. By the end of August 2017 the average position is 26.

As a result of this growth in natural search traffic (ie non paid traffic) Snaptrip has reduced its individual customer acquisition cost by 20%, while still scaling overall revenue growth by 100% each year.

Competition strategy

While there are many brands that offer holidays to self catered properties on a large scale basis none of them are brands focused on a discount orientated consumer or the suppliers looking to fill empty properties.

There are two types of businesses that could compete with Snaptrip for sales:

1. Aggregation sites like Airbnb, HomeAway, Trip Advisor.
These websites do not have complete control over availability calendars, properties are often duplicated across multiple sites. As a result, consumers can find it a long and drawn out process to get a booking confirmed. This problem is heightened for last minute bookings.

2. Dedicated cottage rental companies.
Although these websites tend to have full control of calendars and can complete bookings immediately, the inventory numbers are small and tend to be geographically limited.

Snaptrip offers a huge range of properties that all have up to date availability and are immediately bookable. Solving both problems for last minute consumers.