Much Better Adventures

Idea

Introduction

We’re making it easy to live a life packed with adventure.

Whether it’s a quick weekend or an epic expedition, our curated collection of award-winning, ready-to-go adventures take care of all the route-planning and logistics, so you can just rock up with your rucksack and have a blast.

In the last three years, our community have spent over 50,000 days adventuring in the company of our handpicked local hosts, with every booking also supporting critical conservation work.

In November 2017 we invited our community to invest in us. They smashed our target in 72 hours - one of the largest, fastest crowd raises by a UK travel company.

Fast forward to 2019, adventure sales have grown by more than 135% year on year, and more than 300% in May.

We’re voted the UK’s Best for Experiences and Young Travel Entrepreneurs of the Year, rated 5/5 on Trustpilot, and One of the Best Ethical Travel Companies by the Guardian.

Now it’s time for round 2...

Intended impact

The market for adventure travel is worth over £400bn globally, and growing fast - with people leading increasingly busy lives, and more determined than ever to pack in as many new experiences as possible.

We started Much Better Adventures to fill the void for a fresh, specialist, adventure brand designed for busy professionals looking for a trusted source of brilliant adventures and super-simple online booking.

Our powerful in-house tech platform automates the entire booking flow - replacing the traditional tour operator or agency with a highly efficient and scalable model that connects adventurers to specialist local operators, running adventures often exclusively for our community.

For our local hosts, we’re a simple, effective and low risk way to grow their business while allowing them to focus on what they do best - running amazing trips.

We’re aiming to build market leadership in the UK first, but we’ve got a global opportunity ahead of us.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We’ve proven the model and growth is accelerating. Total adventure sales are up 135% year on year in 2019, reaching £480k in May, and revenues are growing even faster;

Our growth is driven by long term investments in content, search engine optimisation, customer referrals, repeat bookings and partnerships.

We’re proud to be maintaining our ‘Excellent’ score on Trustpilot and average trip rating of 9.4/10 so far this year - the most important metric of all.

2016
• Launched our first ‘Epic Weekend’ adventures across all corners of Europe and N Africa in May 2016.
• Voted UK’s ‘Best for Experiences’ in November 2016.

2017
• Voted UK’s ‘Young Travel Entrepreneurs of the Year’ in Feb 2017.
• Launched our first ‘Big Adventures’ in Nepal Himalayas, Iran and Georgia (and lots more awesome weekends).
• Raised £1.2m in funding from angels and our community.

2018
• Launched trips including the Peruvian Andes, Patagonia, Tanzania, Iran, Brazil and Greenland, not to mention lots more weekends close to home.
• Partnered with Cool Earth to protect 20k primary rainforest trees, and mitigate approx. 4x the carbon emissions of our travellers.

2019
• Featured as ‘One of the Best Ethical Travel Companies’ by the Guardian, and ‘Life Changing Adventures’ by the Telegraph.
• Launched trips in Jordan, Oman, Scotland and the Arctic Circle, with Rwanda, Ethiopia, Colombia and more to follow.

We’ve now got 137 trips on sale across 39 countries, with 639 departures scheduled in the remainder of 2019 alone….

Monetisation strategy

Our hosts typically run trips exclusively for our customers on agreed dates through the year. We typically agree a variable commission fee with them - the more people in a group, the higher commission we earn on that departure. This aligns us perfectly with hosts, who pay nothing unless we send them new groups.

Our average commission in 2018 was 15%, but new agreements in place with our hosts mean there is potential to earn 25-30% on average as group sizes grow.

On average in Q2 2019 we are spending £52 on marketing to acquire a new booking, and we expect this to continue to fall as organic (free) traffic from search engines, repeat bookings, word of mouth, PR and partnerships grows.

We're earning an average of £122 in revenue on that booking, and we aim for this to grow as average booking values and commission margins grow.

When you account for repeat bookings, the lifetime earning potential from customers is much higher.

Use of proceeds

With this funding we can keep investing in:

Content: we’ll keep investing in quality content and resources that fuel organic search engine and social traffic.

Events: we’ll experiment with developing unique adventure events, from film tours to adventure challenges, that will build community and brand.

New adventures: we’ll launch more epic new adventures with local partners worldwide.

Enhanced booking: we’ll continue to perfect the booking experience to make it as seamless as possible, from pairing adventures with suitable travel options, to offering payment in monthly instalments.

We are seeing organic growth in many international markets, in particular the US.

As a fast growing and cash generative business, we expect to be able to grow strongly after this funding round without the necessity for further investment. However, we will be looking at further scale up investment to accelerate internationalisation.