What an ambitious travel startup learned during a global pandemic

When PhocusWire featured Bookaway on its Startup Stage at the back end of 2018, the brand had raised a million dollars and our plan was, as the headline said, “to bring ground transportation online in developing countries”.

Fast forward three years. As Bookaway grew, we saw the scale of the opportunity to digitize the world’s ground transportation industry. We raised cash during the pandemic with a view to buying more businesses in more geographies, creating what is now known as Bookaway Group.

The group has already acquired 12Go, the leading ground transport online travel agency in Southeast Asia and Getbybus, the number one brand in Croatia and the Balkans. Other deals have been signed and talks are ongoing with other brands.

As things stand, Bookaway Group is already the biggest ground transportation aggregator in the world, with the inventory of over 6,000 operators bookable online by travelers in 100+ countries.

Our ambition has not been reined in by what has happened in the travel industry and the world at large over the past three years – if anything it’s inspired us to be even bolder. For example, we’ve identified bus tech for suppliers as an engine of growth and we plan to offer IT systems to bus operators, not just online sales capabilities.

At Bookaway Group we’re aware that ground transport is one of the last areas of travel that hasn’t yet been organized digitally.

Today, travel retailers cannot easily offer travelers a seamless search, booking and payment experience across the world. Ground transport is a $150 billion market and we’re on a mission to organize the sector’s information piece by piece.

Acquiring multiple businesses as a startup has been quite a ride over the past nine months. Here are some of the learnings we’ve taken from our experience.

Go big or go home

The day before we announced a $10 million Series A raise, the World Health Organization described COVID-19 “a public health emergency of international concern”. A month-or-so later, COVID-19 was officially designated as a pandemic.

So our plans to bring ground transportation online suddenly had a new huge entry in the risk column – a global pandemic, which shut down domestic and international travel and whose shelf-life was undetermined – at the time there was no vaccine and no-one really knew what was going to happen.

However, the fact remained that the global ground transportation industry needed to get online. We never wavered from this belief. The only concerns we had were related to when travel would return at scale and we addressed this in our business plan, which assumes COVID-19 is with us until 2024 (although we believe travel is already recovering strongly).

As we talked to other founders, we realized there were other like-minded people and organisations who shared our vision of digitising a sector which, at the time, had lots of regional leaders but no global players. Our vision also resonated with investors, leading to our Series B last summer, the formation of Bookaway Group and the start of our acquisition phase.

It would have been easy to scale back our plans when COVID-19 struck but our strategy was always to become the biggest ground transport aggregator in the business - and with 6,000 operators we’ve achieved that. The plan now is to keep buying brands, becoming even more  dominant.

Here are some of the things we’ve experienced building a group of brands through acquisition during a pandemic.

Come together – when growth is the name of the game, don’t do anything to slow it down

Bookaway Group cannot claim to be the first startup to use Series A and Bs to fund growth and to buy market share, but we’re probably the first company to run multiple travel business M&As on Zoom without meeting anyone face-to-face.

We would also like to be in the frame for being one of the first to approach B2B market share with the same commitment as we approach B2C.

Buying up businesses in different geographies means that the group is currently running different brands on different platforms, with different tech stacks. We are perfectly fine with this -  despite the duplication, fragmentation and costs it incurs – for now at least.

Consolidation of the brands is not on the agenda during the growth phase.. Consolidation is always way more complicated than you think. It becomes totally immersive and dominates internal headspace and gets in the way of projects that can deliver immediate and significant growth.

So we will work on each of our brands’ sites according to what will grow that particular business – one needs a better booking flow and payment gateway; another needs a marketing budget to build its presence in new markets, others need inventory, SEO, social media, etc.

Despite running each brand separately without a complex integration programme, we will bring our inventory sources together. The aim is to offer a single API that allows suppliers and distributors access to the world’s most comprehensive real-time inventory for ground transportation, hosted on modern cloud technology.

This is important because we see ground transport completing the door-to-door experience that so many OTAs and players in the travel ecosystem are seeking to create.

People are people – retain the teams who built the businesses you bought

Have you heard about the war for talent? The acceptance of remote working means developers and coders based in Thailand can work for and charge the same rate as those based in Silicon Valley, and that’s something that every tech company needs to factor into their forward-looking roadmap and costs.

We responded to this by prioritising employee engagement and retention. Again, this is nothing new in the startup world but we’re confident we’re outperforming here as well when it comes to churn. The businesses we bought added 270 people to the payroll and only a handful have left.

We achieved this by convincing loyal staff that the company they now work for is their company. We sold them our vision and invited them to become part of something bigger and global.

We knew this aspect of our M&A strategy was critical to its immediate and long-term success.

We drew on the experience of our senior management and board, many of whom have experienced mergers in their careers and left us in no doubt that the biggest fail point in acquisitions is how employees are treated, not so much the founders and bosses but middle management and experienced front-line staff. We went out of our way to ensure that was not the case for Bookaway Group brands.

For example, personal growth and development is more than a slogan, it’s something we are investing in.

We are proactively formalising knowledge transfer between the brands and business functions, making sure that every vacancy or new role in the group is advertised in-house and that priority is given to internal candidates.

One really important people factor during M&A is communication. It’s critical to communicate clearly to everybody involved, both in the acquired and acquiring company. Usually, post-acquisition, employees have natural doubts.

It's super important to communicate and provide clarity about the future as much as possible and keep an extremely high level of engagement. It’s also ok to be transparent - if you’re not clear on absolutely everything, let people know the direction in which you are heading.

It’s been quite a ride so far but we’re confident in the inherent desire to travel. We see bookings accelerating rapidly since the start of the year and we’re excited to be empowered by our investors to become the leading force in the digitisation of the global ground transportation industry.