Upgrade Pack

Idea

Introduction

Upgrade Pack is all about upgrades. We help our users access discounted flight and hotel upgrades, globally. We operate as a closed marketplace, exclusively serving the customers and employees of our clients; who use Upgrade Pack as the ultimate loyalty benefit.

Banks give access to their premier and private banking customers, credit card issuers add Upgrade Pack as a card benefit for their exclusive card products, and corporates use our platform as a compelling talent attraction and retention tool.

Our travel partners access a high value user base, have the opportunity to sell would-be-unsold inventory, and benefit from the discretion and subtlety of a members-only platform.

Intended impact

We established Upgrade Pack to address three opportunities:

— Users want upgrades, and are happy to pay for them. But we're confident they also want to secure them easily and at a discount.

— Airlines and hotels have unsold inventory and will happily sell it, but often can’t risk damaging or cheapening the brand by publicly discounting.

— Banks, credit card companies, and corporates offer travel related benefits but they lack exclusivity and impact because every one offers the same benefits (airport lounge access, concierge, travel insurance, etc) to their high value customers and employees.

We believed there must be a simple, valuable, and reciprocally-beneficial way to combine the three. What we've built has resulted in a high-margin, lean, zero-user-acquisition-cost, and zero-inventory-cost model that is scalable and globally relevant.

Substantial accomplishments to date

— £1m Pre-Seed Round, (over-subscribed to £1.94m), at a pre-money valuation of £5.67m.

— Built a substantial 2019 revenue pipeline.

— Identified six key launch markets - UK, USA, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland.

— Hired a proven senior team - several VP roles and a Chief of Staff.

— Appointed three Non-Executive Directors from Banking (Joe Norburn, ex-Coutts), Loyalty (JP Lips, ex-AIMIA), and Technology (Peter Doulkhanov, Accenture Interactive).

— Hired a skilled team across Product, Technology, Commercial, Marketing, Partners, and Operations - 17 people as of 21 February 2019, with an additional three at offer stage.

— Set up an enterprise-ready office and innovation lab in Richmond, London - joining technology neighbours eBay, PayPal, Tails.com, Notonthehighstreet, and Sabre.

— Integrated directly with launch travel partners, leveraging new industry technology (NDC - New Distribution Capability).

— All technology built in-house (IP owned by us) - no offshoring, no outsourcing, no legacy technology.

— More than 20 pieces of press coverage since emerging from ‘stealth mode’ in December 2018.

— Launched a Beta pre-registration page that sold out in less than 24 hours, with a sign-up every 55 seconds at one point.

Monetisation strategy

Our revenue model is simple - and based on charging our Clients (the banks, credit card companies, and corporates that we provide customer loyalty and employee benefits services to) rather than our Partners (the airlines and hotels we integrate with).

Our model is subscription based - charging per user per year on long term (minimum one year) contracts. We feel that our pricing is set competitively with other loyalty-type benefits that exist in the same space.

From our own experiences, we feel that the best comparisons are the likes of airport lounge access (We've seen upwards of £30 per year per member), concierge services (upwards of £30 to answer just one concierge call), and annual travel insurance (typically ranging from £20 - £50 per year per policy).

Our fixed-fee strategy allows Clients to plan, budget, and encourage usage - something they can't currently do with the aforementioned benefits due to their usage fluctuations.

Use of proceeds

The proceeds of our Seed Round will be used as growth capital.

Our business model has minimal requirements for multiple offices in order to grow internationally. However we do envisage two non-UK 'hubs', with a handful of employees; acting as a sales and operations base for regional clients. We've identified New York / Toronto as the right cluster for North America, Singapore for South East Asia, and Hong Kong for Northern Asia.

Our 100%-technology-powered platform does not require extensive headcount in order to increase revenue. However we plan to grow our Commercial (Business Development and Client Management) teams in line with pipeline growth.

We expect 50% of our Technology team's activity to classed as R&D, ongoing, including the creation of proprietary and protectable IP. We intend to use some of the Seed Round proceeds to add specific AI experience.

Investor Rewards

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