Luxury Escapes – Adam Schwab building a new, complete one-stop travel booking platform, still with deals and discounts

Hello, I'm Helen Daly. Welcome to Build It, they'll come. Candid interviews with amazing Australian entrepreneurs who started with a humble idea and built it into something substantial and sustainable. It's the human face behind how they built it. On today's episode. People can give their views which can influence how we see the data, so we want to try and work with our customers to get their views on what they want in a trip as well. We've got a team of 200 consultants who speak to customers every day in a building trips for them who can use this tool as well to make that trip better. Five years ago we brought you the story of the Upstart Start-Up Luxury Escapes and how it's co-founder Adam Schwab created and built this much-loved homegrown Aussie travel deals brand. Well today we're excited to bring you up to speed on the pretty incredible Luxury Escapes journey since 2020 when we last spoke to Adam. A new perspective, a slew of new products and deeper inventory measures to improve switching costs and an impressive pipeline to ensure the company's sustainability. That's just a couple of the metrics that they've been doing. A couple of others that are key, they've more than doubled sales revenue to well over $1 billion and staff have increased from 200 to 600 right now. And that's just in the past five years. Another amazing metric is that 20% of all Australians who travel to Bali buy through luxury escapes. Well it's sure been an interesting journey for Adam and his team to grow, scale up and build moats around his business and the parts of it all at the same time. Here's Adam Schwab 2.0. Adam Schwab, welcome back to Build It They'll Come. It's so good to see you again. It's great to be back in person, even better. Love it. And even better now we spoke to you in the midst of the pandemic. I think it was around August September 2020 but I wanted to catch up with you again to really see what's happened since then and where you've gone on your journey too. But let's backtrack a little bit. When you stepped away from being CEO, I think you told me that was in 2019. Why did you feel you needed to do that? There's a few reasons. So we, at the time it was a discussion with the board slash shareholders off to a private company. So it's board and shareholders are largely one of the same. I'm the larger shareholder in Jeremy, my co-founder at the Wig larger shareholder. But we had other shareholders as well. At the time we were looking at doing a sale process and back then it was a private equity process. We were likely to do it. We spoke to strategic as well. We had a lot of that founder mode, manager mode in the last six months. The Brian Chesky's famous sort of speech then that Paul Graham then talked about. And back now we're still very much in founder mode. Although it's a little bit losing its costs after the Richard White and Chris Ells and stuff. But we're still very founder modeish now. 2019 was much more manager mode. So investors, we certainly felt that investors wanted to manage and rein the business rather than necessarily a founder. And it's amazing how things changed in the last five years because obviously it flipped completely in 2021, 2022. But back then we all thought we'll get the best valuation if there's a manager running at Adams not sort of up front in center because there's a founder of the worry that we're relying on a founder and the worry that does the business exceed the sort of where the founder can take it to. So all that sort of stuff now, no one thinks about that. I don't know. People love it. We've seen how Ells once done so well basically backing founders for example. So the markets really changed both public and private. But back then it was different. So we thought let's get a great manager in and we got a fantastic guy in Cam was running the business and then COVID happened. So obviously the sale process was put on ice. Thank God because we significantly increased the valuation and the business as a far better business than it was five years ago. So it was as bad as COVID was for certainly for travel sector. It was actually a blessing in disguise for us in multiple ways. I don't want you to jump ahead too much. But then what was different? Say when you came back when you stepped back in as CEO and that was due to COVID, wasn't it? How different was your management style then? What had you sort of been able to what perspective had been you been able to gain but being away? It's a great way. I think style is deeply probably not hugely different. But it certainly in terms of it's really like I find it much easier to mark when I was at I was a lawyer briefly before started all these entrepreneurs stuff. And it was so much easier to correct somebody else's work whether you're running an article where they do it. It's always easier to see the ten others say from the outside. And having a chance to see the business run and Cam many respects did a great job in a lot of things. And there's some things I was doing very wrong that was continued. I didn't know fault of anyone but just like found the stuff continued on. And you see what you're doing wrong when you when you're not in it anymore. And I was going to office most days. I was still around. But when you're not physically running the business or they're figuratively running, figuratively running the business anymore, you see the mistakes you're making a lot more clearly mistake. Most obvious one is just not and we we obviously wanted to get the best people we could. But we really certainly coming back really focused on how we build this incredible and incredible team. And we had a we had a great team. But obviously as we matured the business. So sort of step one was my former CTO or CTO CTO chief technology officer had moved to Amazon not long after I left and just we wanted to get him back and a great testament to you really. But yes, you lost him to come back. Yeah. And he was like working senior manager of Amazon in Europe in a great role. He's come back and still with us thankfully and done he's built the tech team from 30 people to now or 130 people in that team. Just in your tech team. Yeah. So we've really and we'll talk about the business how it's changed. But getting those people back and you certainly understand the value importance of good people. But we were bootstrapped from day one as we talked about five years ago. And when you bootstrapped you don't have these say money, you're so frugal and everything you do. One thing you're frugal on stupidly is it's not wanting to spend up for great people. Right. So you could see that when you stepped away that maybe I can't do everything. And one thing being away is you obviously forced not to do stuff. And that's great. So I changed like I'm still as you speak to founders every week. And founders inherently are involved in most things. Basically because you've done it the whole time. But it did allow me to escalate myself somewhat certainly more than I was. And now I try and evolve myself and the stuff that I think I can add value and not in the stuff that I can't. And we're much bigger business now. If you look at total stuff, I said a trip of what we were. So it's changed a lot. But in terms of solely sickly, not stepping back as much, but just really focusing on bringing and retaining great people was the really big one. And also just when I was sort of eight months technically not running the business or not technically actually not running the business. So I also did a bunch rather stuff. One of the things I did was we came in as exact chairman of a business called Bookwell with some great people who are running it and we helped them raise or I effectively raise money a couple of rounds for them. This is during cova. This is a beauty booking business in cova, which was obviously very badly hit. And that experience raising money, building models, building decks. That was really helpful as well. So I've actually gained a bunch of skills like this. You didn't drive. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff I sort of learned during that 18 months that I think made me I'll probably not be good to start with. Maybe a much better sort of leader than I was. Maybe I was a two out of ten before maybe I'm a five out of ten. And whatever it is, but you learn, you don't know what you don't know, essentially. Yeah. Rob Rumsfeld unknown. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But it's unknown unknowns as a first time I was, I went from being a junior lawyer to effectively being a running business. So you don't have that apprenticeship. Yeah. Extraordinary. You talked just a few moments ago about, you know, you sort of still in founder mode, even though you've the business has grown enormously. You told us five years ago that, you know, within seven years, you had really built luxury escapes into this extraordinarily loved, but maybe not universally known brand in Australia. It was one of the fastest growing boutique travel online agencies, if I can call it that with, I think you had 1.2, 1.3 million Facebook followers. How would you describe yourself now? Yeah, ultimately we're still very similar in many respects, but much broader. So if you go back to, if you go back to when we spoke and that was early in the pandemic, we were still very much what we call a tactical or flash sales driven business. So we're known for these amazing deals to barley, Thailand, Maldives, Queensland, wherever it is. And they were limited times, but they had to be good discounts, great, great extras, thrown in at dinner, a spa treatment. 40% off when you're factoring the value compared to everyone, like book and calm or expedient, whatever you're comparing us to. And we have pretty limited inventory. So I say you wanted to go to London. If you typed in, we actually had no search bar, but let's assume we had a search bar. If you typed in London, you'd get maybe one result, but probably nothing. Something barley maybe get three or four results, or Thailand maybe get one or two. So we had a very limited range. And that was partly intentional. And also partly just that was how the business was. It was partly solving the paradox of choice. And we were very, so yeah, we were a website. We weren't very technology-driven. And when you needed to convert, and we were just doing this as we spoke, convert to a marketplace business. So the classic marketplaces for travel are book and dot coms, the bifar the biggest, 200 billion Australian dollar business. And then 200 billion Australian dollars is book and dot com cap. So if you think of booking an expedi, so expedi is quite big in Australia, because they bought Wattif and they own hotels.com, bookings ten times as a Wattif. So it's sort of number one, daylight number two. But everybody here sort of associates them as being one on the same. Then you are Airbnb, which obviously is single key villas. They own hotel tonight, which is a small hotel OTA, but really they're single key homes and villas brand. But they still apply. platform. A platform as well. So they don't provide all these deals. Not that there's zero. Both booking and booking do loyalty benefits and stuff like that. But they generally what we call it parity. So the price the booking sells for is the same price of the hotel brand sells for the same price expatia. Technically, there's a lot of rogues in travel who undercut for various reasons. But essentially, there are an equal platform. And booking essentially is the same but for single keys, which is a bit more murky. But booking is a hundred billion dollar Australian valuation business. And then so those two are the giants of the industry and everybody else's significantly smaller. And we looked at at booking as being obviously the market market leader and there's no point us going head to head with a booking because they've got 10,000 people. They might have 500 analysts. So it's very hard and they've got a lot of competitive advantages. They've been building over the past 20 years. They've got supply, so now and all this stuff. And we knew we didn't want to go head to head. We thought, why don't we go? We know we had lots of traffic and we had lots of people who love the brand, but they couldn't get what they want. They want to go to London. You couldn't get, we didn't sell you London. So how do we give people what they want to without destroying that sort of paradox of choice issue or creating a paradox of choice, which is a risk. So we didn't want to have a thousand places in London like a booking.com because it's just, you just got a booking. Like, you know, we business half half a estimation of booking, which we didn't want to be. So we create came up with a curated marketplace, which is we wouldn't show every hotel in London. We'd show maybe a selection of 50 or 60 and 50 or 60 that are ideally curated for you as a four or five six star customer, also with benefits, you know, and get from other platforms. Might be free breakfast. It might be a hundred like credit, whatever it is. And we started building that. And that was, we thought it would be a year, maybe two year process. We had no idea of the complexity of building a marketplace and travel. And obviously, booking spent 20 years plus building it, 25 years. It's incredibly complex by the commercial perspective and from a technical perspective. So we had to, when did you start doing this? Well, the time we spoke five years ago. Yeah, okay. called July August. Yeah. Then. And so first thing we were to start commercial negotiations with all the big hotel brands. So the IHGs, the Accords, the Heights, the Hilton's, etc. And then all the mid-tier brand, all the luxury brands like Shangri-La, and Benichelle, and all these brands. And everyone is a, can be a five year negotiation to get these guys. And they, so to connect to a big brand, they don't really want to connect. It's just a hassle for them. So you need to be able to move enough volume to justify the hassle from the hotel side or from the brand side. So we were just big enough to be able to justify the time. Then dealing with you. Yeah. Yeah. More like smaller than those. They will probably no point for us to waste resources connecting someone who sells a million bucks of inventory for us. Because what's the point? So we had to do the conversion of negotiations. Then we had to do the technical stuff, which we, again, we thought we wouldn't take that long, but you basically have to use these pieces of, it's called a middleware. You may have heard of site-minded, which is a great Australian business worth a billion dollars. They're one, but there's international, there's like a hundred of them internationally. So you've got to connect to this piece of middleware and then you got to connect to the brand and the whole thing can take like a year. It's a per brand. So there's a huge amount of work you have to do to be connected. And even then there's a bunch of work post connection you have to do. So all this stuff that booking.com and it's being speedy, nobody knows about it. But it's just that got thousands of people doing all this stuff, hundreds of people doing all this stuff. So we had to build all this infrastructure. And that's why our team went from 200 to 600 because we're doing all this stuff. So there's all that stuff happening. We're sort of learning on the job. And it's to become what you call a curated market. Oh, my supplies. We're in a platform of hotels that I if I just want to go to London and I don't want to have a holiday in Bali or the Maldeen stuff. We also sell stuff in Bali, I mean, as well. We still do that. Yeah, so we have both businesses now essentially. So our legacy flash business still is slightly the majority of sales, but the newer businesses like called the plus to 40% of sales. Wow. And you've grown that in the last five years. Yeah, same time flashes also grow in probably doubled. So more than double potentially. So we've sort of grown both, but the other marketplace we think adds to flash. So we've also got experiences. Mark, so you can buy bridge clamp or you can buy a restaurant too or you can buy a restaurant itself. So we added an experiences. We always sold experience even from our deals.com that are you days. We always sold experiences. But we now, we've actually brought that in house as part of luxury escapes, focusing on luxury style. Yeah. Experiences could be a massage at the cheese bar at Shangri-La. Well, stuff that you might want to do at that sort of level, not the sort of everyday level. And so we have that business. So we want to sell a thousand experiences a day. So not the same as Clue, go buy to or get your guy, but it's becoming a growing business for us. And really it adds to the trip. And we're building, we started building a few years ago, a product called Trip Planner, which there's a lot of these products around, but nobody's really got it right, which is effectively how do you create the connected trip. So say you're going to Europe, for example, which is quite complex. So you might be staying at 10 different hotels, flying multiple different airlines. God knows how many transfers, God knows how many dinners and breakfasts, all kind of stuff. So you can do it organized too up, potentially, but that's the minority of how people travel. Most people do what's called free independent. So we're we've been working on a product. We have a product, 100,000 people plus of use, but we're actually getting close to having an AI driven version of the product. So you'll be able to tell us. So the beauty of if you can take a step back actually, is to why we're in a great position to build a trip planning product. We're in booking.com, couldn't get it run, get it done is two reasons. One, we've always been a very UX UI. So user experience, user interface, business. So we want the site to be really easy to use, really customer friendly. We've got an amazing design team. Bill like a fan base. We've always had a design focus. So we think we're in a group of into bills. I mean, it looks beautiful and it's functional. But more importantly, it's actually three reasons. More importantly, we sell everything. So if you look booking sales hotels, webjet sales flights, get your guide sales experiences, nobody sells everything. We sell the entire trip. So if you want to have a connected trip product that really can sell you everything, nobody can do it. So we can sell you the transfer from your house to the airport. We can sell you the airport lounge. If you're not flying business class, we can sell you the office of the flight. We'll show you the hotel. We can sell you the cooking class. So you are trying to be a bespoke travel agent, but online. That's what we've always, essentially always been, but we didn't have the product breadth and selection now. What we've built over the last five years is gone from 100 products on the site to 100,000 products on the site. And doing it in a way where we're bombarding you with a thousand different options. So it's really still limited. So if you go back to sort of the connected trip product, ideally the third advantage we have is we've got a huge amount of data on our customers because people use luxury escapes as inspiration to 95% of our customers weren't planning on going to destination or the hotel till we told about it. So we give customers great travel ideas and concepts. So people are browsing around luxury escapes, they're trying to get inspiration and looking at different stuff and we're learning what you want to do. We're learning so we can target you better in terms of I want to show you if you've got two kids in your family, I don't want to show you adults only stuff. But if you've got no kids, I don't want to show you lots of family things. I want to show you the right stuff. It's not to be so versed if I want to show you stuff that's more relevant, saving time and make your whole day planning process more enjoyable. So we're getting always the info on our customers to make the UX better. Same time we can use that to make the trip plan better. So at the same time we've got always great data. We've got always products and we're asking people some questions. Ask people, do you want to do you like walking when you go to London or do you prefer to get taxi or do you prefer to get a train or a tube or do you like to spend a B or C on your on your on your dinners and using that information you've given us and you've told us how do we use then use generative A or a great a great trip plan for you. So there's no individual consultant dealing with me on this. There's also a consultant. If you want to speak to a person that's a separate we've got 200 people that speak to customers every day but this is a product rebuilding that is tech driven but our consultants will also use it. Right but I will be able to plan this long trip say or partly in Europe, partly in Asia, partly just staying in a hotel and then partly you know can someone drive me around northern India. I can I'll be able to do that. Absolutely. What's the difference between us? We're essentially giving you suggestions. We're trying to so we sell all this stuff but there's 100,000 things on the site and how do you know what to buy? So what we're trying to say is here's 99,980 things you don't want to buy. Yeah. Here's the 20 things we think could be a great trip but you might say actually Adam that's a pretty bad suggestion for me and click away from that and say actually toggle me in other three restaurants and then you can hopefully be able to book the restaurants straight on the on the plan. The idea is if you think of when you travel now use a PDF that your travel agent's given to you and you sort of hand writing stuff on the side every time and this is the beauty of this is you're constantly evolving and updating as you're traveling so you might say I'm in New York or when I know about. And booking. Yeah exactly and you can also book from not from us if you want to book separately you can book not from us and just add it in so it's that constantly evolving itinerary that lives and reads it on the app or on the website. So how big and expensive is this build? How long is it take for you? We're working on it for like four years but it's not a huge it's a pretty small team working on it but it's it's really the culmination of what 80 other people are doing so some people have to work on getting the product some people we've got a search team we've got a data team and we've got a what we call leery which is a relevance team so it's sort of combining the work of it's standing on the shoulders of sort of 80 people to culminate all the work we're done so it's hard to say all these four people are working on troop plan up is really eight four people working on it. But is the tech part of it the hardest bringing all those different components that as you say booking.com has been able to do quantus hotels has been able to do everything um Expedia Webjet they can't do it all. The final court the algorithm the algorithm part which is sort of try to work out what is hell and what I do is to have all that's definitely not the hardest part the hardest part is getting all the different types of inventory and gain the data on people and also just understanding the data and understanding what kind of customer you are and also then using your preferences as well because we also ask people because we don't not that we don't trust our own sort of view of the data but people can give their views which can influence how we see the data so we want to try and work with our customers to get their views on what they want in a troop as well. Same time out we've got the get a team of 200 consultants who speak to customers every day and are building trips for them, who can use this tool as well for to make that trip better. So we have some better third of our customers would rather speak to somebody before they purchase. Yeah. And we've got a retail store we opened up about two years ago now in Chadsden and hopefully opening up really soon in Sydney. Why? Because Chadsden has been a great success. Why did you go retail? Or be it small at the moment. Yeah. It's actually a non-material in a sense of our total revenue, but it actually punches well above its weight. In terms of average basket size is significantly higher than a normal average basket, which is kind of obvious in a way because you're going to go into a store probably because you're buying something more complex. But there's definitely a cohort of people who want to face it. And that's why flight things have been such an amazing. I think you probably interviewed screw. It's uncooperable. It's been such a great business and it still is a great business. It's got 25 billion dollars in sales. It's one of the big in terms of sales, one of the biggest business in the country. Forget Marcus Jordan. It's a great. And they almost all obviously got the corporate business for that all face to face. So we look at what screws done and what I'll be in the hell oh world, which is obviously just to inform. Lister's screw turner Adam is mentioning who's the CEO and founder of Flight Center and a great Australian business. It's amazing. God. Yeah. After a true legend. And we look at how well and the day we opened our first store, screw 70 messaged things about time. So he's been a great inspiration and supporter. Everybody in travel. Yeah, obviously we sort of compete half can we don't really but we sort of every sort of does. We look at booking as a much more relevant competitor than flight is. We sort of saw alongside flight is and they're an amazing bit. They're a flight truth and business where a land driven business hence why booking is a much sort of more relevant competitor. Yeah, right. But yeah, we I've always loved retail. I love the retail experience and that we know that we always knew there was a cohort of people who wanted to buy retail and wouldn't buy online. But we always that we thought if we can break even off this store, we created the bottom we think is the most luxurious travel store in the world. It's beautiful looking travel store huge capex in there. It's 400 square meters which is probably five times the size of every other travel agent. Is it paying for itself yet? Well, it actually makes pretty decent profit. When did you open it? Did you say? Just over two years ago. Oh, two years ago. Just under two years ago. It's almost two years now. And it's grown like every month pretty much. We got an amazing store manager in there. And the beauty is people once they go once they tend to come back and it takes a while to build that. So we're now do like you know, we're not doing sort of a Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton might do a hundred million bucks in sales in Chadston. But we're not miles off. Like it's a pretty decent. It's pretty decent revenue. We will probably the highest if not the highest one of the highest grossing. Sorry, I have to take you back there. You might be approaching a hundred million sales revenue. Not quite there, but I think we can get within striking distance of what those amazing luxuries obviously they have much higher margins than us though. They're like a 70% margin. We're like, yeah, but they've been a brand. They've been a brand going for many many years and they've got you know, huge brand reputation. Everything you've been going not that long. Not in definitely not as long as. And you've been a retail person. Yeah, that's. That's a lot. And I think a retail person says you can't the big shopping centers and they've been great. Chadston was amazing and the shopping centers were dealing with city of amazing. But when whilst we're relatively known as a brand now, we're not known as a retail brand. So there's a lack of not like a trust. But they're thinking well, I can speak to Louis Vuitton with their 30 to 75 different brands. And I'll get 10 of them in and we know they're going to be a great brand for us versus you guys. We sort of heard of you with luxury skates. You guys have like one store. So that certainly before that, we had zero stores. So getting and chads are amazing and really sort of understanding what we wanted to build. If you look at our store in Melbourne, we've got, if you've seen the Louis Vuitton store Singapore airport Changi, yes, the big screen. Yes. So we basically copied that. So we've got big screens at the front with travel, beautiful travel imagery out the front that we can also put our partners on there. So we're doing a brand activation with an airline or a cruise company or Fiji or whoever we can have those that imagery out the front. There's really eye catching and beautiful. And that was a bit of a bonus adventure with Chadston because it's very unusual and quite sort of not in my face. But it's big. And it's really nicely done. It's not as invasive as Louis Vuitton is in Changi, but that's been amazing because you really noticed the store. And I think it's a real show piece. And it's I think it's a showpiece for Chadston. That's amazing. When you're starting in Sydney. Hopefully we get fit out in a couple of months. It's been a bit of a process. So maybe by the end of the year, you will hopefully rely on the retail presence in Sydney. The aim is we look at Apple as the greatest one of the greatest value unlocks in brands was Apple's retail. Apple's done a lot of stuff right when supposed jobs coming back. But look at the retail the value of the retail business of Apple has been unbelievable. I believe trillions of dollars are value graded. And we look at that and say, well, we want to do for our brand what Apple was able to elevate with their brand. And it's been really like half the customers who buy from our store and have been bought from us before. And the average basket size is like four X or whatever it is or three or four X. So we see a significant uptake. Four X what? Four X what would be online. Yeah. And probably like two and a half X on the phone. So it's been yeah, it's been amazing. And the ability to speak to customers constantly and sell a right or range of product even more so on in the store. Incredible. Can I just take you back? Because I want to get back to all these products you've been because how did you get out of COVID? Now I think when we talked, it was only a few months into the pandemic. And you know, everyone was still a bit freaked out. Certainly March April May of 2020 was very difficult, but then JobKeeper and all sorts of help came to hand and people worked out how they could do their businesses. Travel business obviously really hard hit. But what was the true impact of COVID on your business? Financially, it was pretty significant. It was in there sort of well into the tens of millions of losses. And that was partly because we were pretty aggressive. The beauty of our customers were really loyal to us and we're happy to keep virtually everything on credit. So as a result, our cash balance actually didn't change through COVID, but our balance actually got a lot worse. Because we as people started to travel, we didn't have to start paying the hotels and the cash started on wine. And we got a negative working capital business. So we actually did our first ever capital raise in 2022 because she needed it. It wasn't growth capital because we never need growth capital. We needed to feel the balance sheet. We actually did a primary and secondary, so shareholder sold down. So we raised over 100 million bucks and half sold down. Actually, that first, we actually did a couple of branches. Some of you shareholders to give them some cash. And some of it is to enable you to pay your own business. Yeah, so we put like 50 million bucks, roughly into the business. And yeah, you say pay the bill just to get the sort of working capital position back when it was pre-COVID. And we are what we call negative working capital business, our customers pass before we pay the hotel. They're like an insurance company. So now we've got obviously lots of cash now because travel's record level. So it did take a while. Okay, but sorry, just that 2021, how did you fare? How bad or difficult did it get? So it didn't. The beauty for us is we can sell to a few people kept their sort of purchase on credit. So we weren't don't like that. So we're dogging you for the money back. Our customers remain. And because the people bought deals, it's not like if you went to like a book and not call me, you bought something off the shelf, we might as well have fun because you get by cheaper now because everything got cheaper. But because we had special deals, people were just willing to just keep it on hold because they couldn't buy those deals anywhere else. They wanted to keep the deals when it's when it's bored as open. So customers are incredible. We're phenomenal supporters. Also, we could sell Australia to Australia, which has always been a big part of our business. So yeah, the lockdowns, those ridiculous interstate lockdown things were like just moronic and that we get 2,000 calls in an hour. And we have say we have like 30 people on customer support at the time. You just can't deal with that volume. So that was that was super hard for our team. There's a lot of burnout. That was just frustrating. We have government interventions. And now you look for and I'll probably would have said it at the time. But like everything I said at the time, like I didn't know if I was right or not, but turn out like everything people who doubted the Dan Andrews of the world turned out to be 100% right. So it's a shame that we had to go through something so unnecessarily. But as it turns out, we were like really lucky that we had amazing customers. Be it could sell Australia, Australia or US to Mount Aves or so these unusual routes. And we like we didn't we obviously dropped off in revenue. We didn't never definitely never went to zero. So we went we lost maybe like 60% of sales. So we were able to we didn't not only did we not fire anybody like every other travel business in the world. We actually increased the size of our team during. You didn't fire anyone. No, it was what kind of you lost to people who were just that happens. Yeah. Normally. So but in terms of we never we didn't fire a single person as a result directly of COVID. Okay. Which is like even booking.com. The Godzilla of travel businesses removed about 20% of the team or whatever was. And then any event's crew turn ahead to. Oh, it was a lot of that store. So that was that was that really unfortunate. It was definitely not. The time we didn't have stores that was helpful. But so we were really lucky. We were able to keep our team, keep our really good people and then bring on really good people. As we probably got a bit aggressive in you sort of said 2021 and 2020 2022 was still an even 23 was still challenging for us. And that was partly because it was still challenging for travelers. Yeah, people were traveling. Revenue was well above COVID. But margins weren't as high and the flight and the airlines were starting all the margin out. So he saw or not just quantities. The islands globally. What does that mean? Stouching all the margin out. They were taking capture of our creation. They were capturing more value and they were creating because they could charge 20,000. Yeah. That's like they're they're they're not we're going to market based economies. The airlines should be charging as much as they can really. It was up the governments to not all not bail them out in the first place without getting a equity state. That's a separate issue. But so the islands were trying to recompense the losses they made and that's fine. And supply hadn't come back on, which was frustrating. So we were sort of creating we face this almost perfect storm of what's a revenue, lots of costs, but not that much profit. 2020, 2020, 2020, our revenue was going great, but we just weren't saying profit. And we only really saw our profit really come back nicely last year, and this year, hopefully, we continue to grow it. So we're now almost where we were in terms of sort of top line. Three times what's the most pre-COVID? Three-COVID. And in revenue. In sales or revenue. And we should be significantly more profitable. We are significantly more profitable now. So we're a much bigger team. So it's a much big us stronger. Like if you look at us pre-COVID, there was some really great things about that business, but we always, in part of the reason for this other process, is there's a chance that was the business we more valuable in other people's hands. Now we think we've done a really great job. But we think you think of sort of the state, the two main sort of challenges for an entrepreneur is one, you've got to get product market fit. And you speak to, most of you speak to have mostly have, well, you know, it's all have product market fit. Question is do you have a competitive advantage, which is are you able to generate more profits than your netters essentially? And you speak to, we look at Hamilton Helmer's seven powers, which the acquired guys talk about a lot and we've got a lot on our pod. And I won't go through more, but brand obviously really K1, cornered resource, which is something you have that other people don't have, which could be a rare, a sminer, or could be a, could be Nvidia having a source code nobles has. And we, we always had some cornered resource in our, there's exclusive deals that we have. One should, the big challenge we had as a consumer, consumer online business is there's no switching costs, which is, you think business that have great switching costs, that could be a article or an S.A.P. or a just explain to listeners what exactly you mean by that. So my switching costs you, so you could buy a holiday from us, you could go to Bali, have an amazing best holiday of your life. And then come back and go to booking.com the next day, because there's no reason to book through us other than the fact that you might just really like us or you might say a better deal from us. But if you see a better deal on booking or expedient or a bit of a even if a developer, you'll probably go to them because there's no real, there's no need. I'm like, if you've got Oracle, a big database system in your business, you can't just switch that to Chinese because it's like 20 million bucks. So, or if you, if you got your mortgage with someone, yeah, you can switch, but it's a hassle, you know, I'm just switching to more. No, that's right. Yours might be, oh, well, I don't get a free meal with, yeah, with booking.com. But I, you know, the hotel, 50 bucks cheaper. Exactly. If you got, like your credit card, yeah, you can change credit cards, but after what, I want to change 30 different things. So there's the grief of switching costs in most products. And we had, and if you look at sort of retail business, they're probably a lot worse. So my average owns is like zero switching costs. You can go from one to the other and it's why that people, hence why they're crying great loyalty plans. So when you, we needed to build some sort of switching costs in the business. And if you look at, talking about loyalty, the credit rate of great switching costs is through a loyalty scheme. So look at the best, one of the best loyalty skim is in the world is quantitous loyalty scheme. You think people to get platinum or to get platinum one, but especially platinum is probably the great use case. People spend two, three, four, five grand extra on flights to get a lands that's worth 50 bucks. So quantitous has got this incredible business, where they, particularly to arbitrage business, but they sell points to banks and they, they give you this status based on using their service. And people will pay 30% more for an emeralds flight coach here with quantitous just to get the status credits to keep platinum. So, they don't unbelievable job at using loyalty to create outsized profitability. And we look at quant and bookie not com. They're a great job with their genius platform, which is a free loyalty plan. But the more you book at them, you should get discounts. And we thought, we actually thought five, six years ago, but became more and more sort of crystallized as we start thinking about competitive advantage. And we thought we need to build a loyalty plan. And we want to build, we spoke to the loyalty co-guy, we work with the loyalty co-guy, the experts on loyalty and they work with everyone in Australia. And we went through all these different forms of loyalty and we ended up going back to the one one, which is the status credits and the earn burn. We looked at all the different formulas. There's like the flyby's way. There's lots of different ways to do it. And the same time, we also want to create a paid loyalty tier, a bit like quantous club versus quantous reconfly out. So we actually launched the paid version a better year ago, it's under a year ago, which we call Lux Plus. Lux Plus, which if you pay to be part of it. Yeah, it's $500 sign on fee and $250 a year. And what do you get? That's a lot. You get significant discount. So you can save up three grand a year. Our average customer's saving like two X, what they pay. So it's a great saving for our customer and you must add them. That sounds like a pretty dumb business plan. Like why would you give someone double what they say? And the reason is we're trying to avoid paying the Google tax. So every business, whether it's online or offline, especially online, has to, and this goes back to the switching cost point, you have to re-acquire a customer. So you've been brought from luxury escapes once. I'm still advertising to a very existing customer. So if somebody comes straight back to us because they're a Lux Plus member or they're a society member, which is our wider logic, I'm not paying that Google tax necessarily on you. I'm hopefully not. So I'm not pointing you're not having to advertise to me again. I'm very, very, very, very, quite. Yeah. So I'd much rather give a customer discount than pay Google or Facebook or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really Google's a relative for sort of paying marketing. So and Lux Plus has been really successful. When I look at, we look at the behavioral economics of what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to achieve the sun cost fallacy, which is, and not just say that term again, sun cost fallacy. Sun cost cost fallacy. I'm sorry. Yeah. Sun cost, which is if you've invested in something you want to sort of make the most of it. So and once people have invested your 750 or your 250, whatever it is in Lux Plus, you want to make the most of that. And our customers saving saving a bunch of money by doing it as well. So we, we've seen Lux Plus members spend about 50% more time on site. Look at 50% more offers have double the click rate, double the, so all the things we thought would happen have happened with it, which has been really great. How many members? We're approaching 50,000 now. But I mean, members and none of them, none of them's got for, oh, actually a tiny call. What may be got for free, but virtually everybody's paid for it. We may do deals with credit like high and credit card companies to give it via them. They pay for it, but okay. Most customers have paid in pretty much everyone has paid in. And that's because we want that that boardy notion of it. And so far, it was in really strong cohort behavior from our members. Some days, like even though it's only a relatively small percentage of our total customers, there can be like 30 or 40% of products bought by this cohort. So it's, it's a really powerful cohort. And that's that led us to invest much more aggressively in our wider loyalty, which is the Quantestile of the Quantest Virgin Style in Bern and status credit. So when we, when we build that out, you sort of have the choice. You can, you can do like a quarter Costco club jet startup, setup, which is kind of low buy in. And then, you know, get that much value. You get a bit of value. It was like both great, great loyalty plans, like amazing. The Costco's are going to be the best in the world or one of the best in the world. But all you can go the high buy in and high value, which is called the Quantest Method. So we thought given our business, we're actually better off the Quantest Method, which is, so we've got the platinum gold silver bronze tiers. And to get to platinum's actually really hard, you've got to spend significant amount of money with luxury escapes. But once you get unbelievable benefits, you get all my, like you get a number of upgrades, which can be quite bad. It can be like $500 worth of upgrades. You get free land jacks, as you get free chauffeur driven airport transfers. So real, real hard value. Amazing. And what's this one called? This is called society. Society. We like to, so it's separate to Lux Plus. Yeah. So that's society's free. And we'll, hopefully, we're trying to do deals with banks and credit card. Yeah. Or like to, to, to, so you can quickly transfer your eight mixed points or whatever points you have your city points and ad points to society points like Quantest do so well, like version do so well. Yeah. Yeah. And the same that has to, you've got the sort of points earned burn and then we'll work with our partners to give one thing about travel is there's a lot of travel providers who want business, but don't want to discount. So some of a lot of our hotels, I've loved discounting. I've getting the massive millions of dollars of revenue. But not everybody want, if you're a luxury brand, you know, super luxury manual. I mean, discounting. But the, you know, you want to keep your money. Yeah. The beauty of a points mechanism is we can, well, actually, answer about the margin, the more worried about the brand reputation of, yeah, to be safe. No, no, no, no, I guess. And some of those are certainly months. Yeah. For like that sort of level, they'll, they'll, they'll basically never discount like, oh, we make you never discount like Louis Vuitton never discount. Same sort of thing. There's a lot of brands that never wanted discount. And the beauty of a points mechanism is that's why all the airlines created free-conflict schemes is they can discount classic rogers as a massive discount. So they can discount on sold seats via this points mechanism and create law to the same thing. So we'll be able to do the same thing. So work with our, our partners, be it hotel, be it crews, be it, like whatever, to give effectively discounts through a different points burn mechanism or ratio essentially. So there's that, that whole opportunity. And then the same time as how do we build in switching costs through status credits? So every time you're by for must, you're getting status credits. As you get more status credits, you're getting more free stuff. Yeah. So the upgrade is the, so the incentive is not to switch out. Yeah. So like, you can buy from us or booking for the same price. Well, you know, the buy from us because you're getting the free, the free lounge access, the airport and the free limousine transfer from home, which will cost you a hundred bucks, otherwise. So this is just started. Norse the last week. We've got, I think we're approaching 100,000 members in sort of week one, but it's free. So you kind of expect fantastic. And we want to try and get a million within, within just over a year or within a year. We're never going to be at sort of 20, or 10 million quanters to have because that just obviously a bigger business than us. But at a million plus becomes hopefully really meaningful for us. But what we're looking for more than a number of members is we want the behavior of members to change. We want to build those, which in cost and build that competitive advantage. And this is that we're trying to create a hundred year brand, not a five year brand that we're trying to flock off to the highest bidder. We're trying to create real value. We know we've got our product, certainly our hotel product is the best in the world. Like the value we give is like demonstrally better than anyone else globally. You can pair us to anyone else and we're clearly the best. So we want to make sure that customers buy everything from us, not just the really great hotel. We want to sell the, again, the cooking class, your skate trip, your golf trip, whatever you're doing and you're getting points for it all at times, you're getting credits for it all at times, you're getting reward of the more you buy from us, which is the whole point of loyalty really. What is your competitive advantage, though? I suppose you're really explaining it in many different ways. And do you have a motor round your business? As we're talking, there are so many very good travel businesses. Why can't others do what you're doing? If you look at the seven-power, Hamilton Helmut talks about seven different ways to build competitive management. And competitive advantage another word of mode. So the biggest one in every great business brand. Look at every big business and the really great, the most valuable business in the world, combined brand and scale. So if you look at Microsoft Nvidia Apple, it's all brand and scale. And if you look at Nvidia, it's brand scale, process power. So Nvidia has this great process power being able to design these great chips. You can argue to MSC, I told you, who make the semiconductor tabs have got a bit more process power, but clearly Nvidia's got great process power. Nvidia has also got network, because they create their own. What's it's called, code R or Coober. They own their own language. So if you want to use Nvidia chips, you've got to use that language. Yeah, right. It's free, but it's a bit of a network. We don't have. It's very rare to have network at that. We don't have a real network. We think we've got brand and we're building more and more brand. So we've got brand of that customers who trust us, so the million people who travel a year with luxury escapes trust us. So that's certainly some brand power there and name recognition. Our powerful brand element is with our hotel partners. Our hotel partners trust us to represent that brand really well and to move huge volume of inventory. So look at it. That's about really great partners through Bali. And especially with Bali as a use case, if you look at Bali, we sell about 20% of Australians who go to Bali, go through us and Australia is by far the biggest Bali. Wow. So if we were a country. So I just say that again, 20% of Australians who go to Bali buy through you. Yeah. And that's only been since you started in what 2012, 2013. Yeah. And if you look at us extraordinary because lots of Australians say go there. If we were a country, we'd be the eight largest country, supplying Bali. So if you're a Bali hotel and resort and don't work with us, you're probably not making that much money because we just direct customers around you. Yeah. Which is not great for them, but then customers who do work with us make a heap of money because we do have them always volume really inexpensively for them. So obviously they've got to give inclusions and discounts. But they don't have to pay a tax to advertise. Yeah, exactly. We're not doing the advertising in market. Yeah, it's always been a fortune on marketing for our partners. So we've got a TV show, we've got a magazine. We've got always stuff that we can help our partners with as well. So we've definitely got some brand power with our partners and obviously with our customers. And we've got that cornered resource, which is those great relationships with brands. And it's great deals that nobody else in the world has. So we've got. Do we have scale in a way we do? So clearly our scale is in bookend.com. We're not a 200 billion dollars. But we've got scale in our specific market. So if you look at Bali, where the big number one supplier to Bali, where number supply to Fiji would be up there with Queensland. So where we sort of hone our force, we're really. We do actually do have scale. So that scale then gives us ability to leverage the best deals from the hotels because the hotel's benefit from lots of customers. So we have that scale benefit. So we're not a scale benefit like bookend.com who can amortize as expenses over a much bigger revenue. That obviously comes as we grow year on year. But we definitely have scale be out, but sort of get these great deals for our customers. Yeah. And create that win-win-win. So if you look at it and then we're trying to create switching costs obviously. So again, I can also. The other one or the other powers is canna positioning. So what's canna positioning? That's the ability to do something different than incumbent. And we've got what we do. Our legacy business is like booking couldn't do what we do because they just be cannibalizing themselves. It just doesn't work with their business. So as good a book as good a business as booking is, they can't turn around and do flash deals like we do because it just doesn't make sense for that platform. It just doesn't fit. So we look at in terms of competitive powers, we definitely think we've got in brand. We've got something. We've got some scale. We've got some corner resource. And we're trying to really aggressively build switching costs. So I think most very rare. Like Microsoft has all the powers. And Vitya might have most of them. It's pretty rare businesses have more than sort of two or three powers. So if we can get switching costs locked in, then we think we've got a business that's really sustainable and really easily able to grow over the next sort of 5, 10, 15 years. Extraordinary. Your model has always been to bootstrap the business, put back in what you make. Right from deals.com and my table and all that. As you started luxury escapes, you never took on any venture capital or angel investors. But you do have a few investors now. The capital raising did that bring in any big VC or. Well, not VC. We've probably been a bit too big for VC. So we've got to the point where. Yeah. it goes beyond profitable for a while. The VC's actually obviously do now do later stage. So. Or private equity, I suppose. Yeah, really. So we're more in the private equity realm then. But that's another canvas. As you can for now, it's mostly sort of PE investors coming in or even more public marketing investors coming in. But we raised through a business called Orkdus who were publicly listed. They may actually privatise since. But they work with ultra-honet worths and financial planners around Australia to raise funds for each investment. So it's like a private equity firm but doesn't deal by a deal basis. Right. And they're amazing to work with Campbellt's it's on our board who runs Orkdus. They were really great. They. So they sort of bring investors, ready made investors to you? We work together. They're almost an old school merchant thing. So I would pitch to investors with the Orkdus team. And it's their friends of all. Or people they know. So what sort of investors did you get in that realm? A great arapment from some ultra-honet worths who you see on the AFR, Rich List, people who invested 250K. But a lot of. I've met a lot of famous sports people invested. So not necessarily anyone who's bought 30% or 20%? So as a group Orkdus is about 25%. And the highest individual. What we look at as one, one one's individual. It's like a fund. Yes. It's like when a VC invests in you, you get the VC as the investor. But they've got 100 OPs. Exactly. So the OPs. I have more exposure to the OPs than if it was a VC investment. Right. Because they all meet with some of them annually. We've got a big group of investors from down in Jolong, who are some very successful entrepreneurs who live in Jolong. And many. Some invested a million dollars plus. And I'll sort of get down there annually and chat to them. And talk to them. Yeah. A lot of them are customers. Jeremy still. Yeah, it's Westart, a cool. Biggest investors. I think. Biggest investors. I'm slightly beginner in us now. Okay. We're combined with the biggest. Yeah. If you combine us. But yeah, I'll continue to make an amazing job with that. The only outside capital we've ever had in. And do they. interfere in terms of. Do you ring them every day? Do they ring you every week saying, "What's happening?" No, no. The Campbell's on a pool. Campbell's on a board. He's got same access to. Yeah. As any other board member. Monthly board reports. Oh, if everyone wants to speak to me, I'll never speak to him. But he's super smart and understands the business. And doesn't need daily update. So you get all our directors and directors. That's what they're doing. Do they. What to do? I think. No, actually, they wrote. Actually, my board's fantastic. But like, I mean, I'm on a bunch of boards. And there's always a temptation to sort of try and tell the founder what to do. And understand. But I think most board. Most do. And I'm the same as director. Like, if CEO's fan is ignoring you, you can't ask part of the job. So. I'll never disregard. Like, some. I might get 20 piece of advice. And maybe we might implement one or two of them. Because often they 18. That we haven't done. We have a thought of them. And. We thought of it or. And it wasn't. We didn't think it's worthwhile doing. Or we hadn't thought of it. But we think we've got other things we'd rather focus on. So you always take the feedback on board. Yeah, of course. Any shareholder knows. And I may as a shareholder, when I'm wearing my shareholder hat for other businesses, know that it's just advisory in the CEO of the founder. You sort of trust that person to. He or she, to run the business as best they can. If they're not the right person, you move them on. Yeah. One thing I want to ask you about was, you know, in the old days, and that's any a short time ago, you did a lot of. Many Australians would remember your full page ads in Sunday newspapers, particularly full page newspaper ads. That doesn't happen in the. Not happens. Same as her. You must not be wearing the paper as much. Well, I don't read the hard copy. Yeah, that's interesting. We still get great results from hard copies. So that's still a really important part of your marketing? Or is it mostly shifted to. It's been a minority for a number of years. Social media. Google SCM is still number one. Yeah. Made a number two. But like, court newspaper, it will be 10%. So it's not insignificant. And we still get both from nine and obviously news court. We see a great result from both papers. We're pretty careful. And we do. We have a UK business going really well. We have a Towson UK papers as well. Right. Australian papers generally form better, but UK papers do, okay. So yeah, we've got our own media. So we have a magazine that's now got 20,000 plus subscribers. We've got a TV show that we've had doing season. filming season eight of now. That we're about to hopefully get international distribution soon. That's on Fox to Fox. It's an incredible job. And we also partner with previously 10, going back to seven this year. So it's been a really great outlet to work with our partners. And obviously get lots of great new customers as well. Yeah. How difficult is it to both attract and retain customers? I mean, I know that's why you're building the. particularly the no switching. Yeah, it's one cost. Yeah. Well, everything's got a price right. So you're going to attract. I can attract the billion customers around the world if I'm worth a $8,000. If you want to, okay. Yeah, right. Where a business is focused on growing profitably. So we want to profitably grow each year. We could easily. And is this. And is this. Yeah, and we saw where we record profitably this year. We want to keep growing that. And we could. I could easily double revenue to $2 billion tomorrow if I was willing to make a loss like after. So the business we were saying for the last five years we just lost money. We hand over the first. Thankfully, investors are finally sort of seeing the light and realize we can't keep investing in these businesses and never make any money. Yeah, yeah. But we've. Because we need to be at least money. not free anymore. Yeah, absolutely. But we're being bootstrapped. Obviously take out the rise. But the rise wasn't growth capital. That was that was balance sheet. It's from this freaker then. But because when you bootstrapped, you have to make money. Otherwise you don't like. So we've always had that mentality that yes, we want to grow. We're sort of a 20% a year grow. We grow faster in like international markets. We're going to Australia. So it's 20% ish, which we could grow much faster if we want to grow profitably and sustainably. And we're not interested in growing it 100% but losing 50 million bucks a year. So you look at the, even some of the sites that the market loves like Temple of Webster, well, they had a great quarter, a couple quarters ago because they spent like all their extramarginal marketing and they put it back to that credit. But we could do that as well. But we choose not to do this. It's a conscious choice. Yeah. So I think five years ago you said to me, your turn over, your top line sales was about approaching 500 million turn over. What is it now? We're well above a billion now. Begin that's like turn over is a bit cheap because we're going to quite easily sort of manipulate it. What we're really focused on in the last really last 18 months is contribution margin, which is revenue less cost goods sold less marketing essentially. So is that essentially a profit? Well, then you've got your employee numbers like that. But we're pretty stable below that line. So we're actually internationally. So we were growing really quickly in the US, but not profitably contribution margin. Right. So what we said to marketing team and Ben at my own said, yeah, I don't care what our top line is. Just get this contribution margin positive. And we've done that now. So pretty much every international destination is contribution marginally spray caven and UK we're now profitable not massively, but slowly and growing 50% annually. We could easily grow UK 100%. But we don't want to be losing money over there. So it's just a conscious choice we make is to operate the business on a sustainable manner rather than just this sort of spending hand over the first like exactly as 2021. Yeah. And you want to make sure you know that you're making profits as you go. Yeah, exactly. I'll do business is valued by the present value of cash flows. And if we're not generating increasing cash flows, you're on year and we should especially give away negative working capital business significantly. So but if we're not doing that, then we're not doing the right thing much. What's the main focus in the pipeline for growth? We've actually come up five years of lots and lots of product lead growth. So lots of new products. And we're still so like the new version of trip planners, we're doing new staff using it. Yeah. And you're a huge. Yeah. Absolutely. That's a huge investment. That was half a team was working on that. So now I think if you look at going forward, yeah, there's still some cool stuff in the pipeline. But it's really how do we incrementally grow more pro how do we keep growing at a 20% big grow our profit margin as well as that to get the double opening the jaws essentially. So we want to say out our every dollar revenue dropped to a bar at a higher rate every year. And how do we get that from 3% to 5% 7% if you look at again, we talk about flight is this the great high water market of Australian travel businesses. They drop about 1.5 cents of sales to net profit. So travel inherently is a really low margin business. We want to try and get us at a 4 5 cents because we don't sell as much flights as flight is do. So if you look at one of our not competitors, but it's contemporaries internationally called Voyage Breve, which is a French business, they historically converted about 7% of turnover to EBITDA. So they've been going along on the NAS and they're a great business and we look to them as really little leaders in the space. And they if they can hit 7%, we think we should be able to hit 7% at sort of terminal. So even keep growing revenue to the top line of 2 plus billion and you're dropping it at 5%, 6%. That's that's a 100 million dollar EBITDA business, which is what we want to try a spider become in the next 5 years. More broadly looking at travel and watch the marketplace you're existing in, what's the outlook for travel and your place in it for the rest of 25 and 26. I mean, we're now looking at predictions of slowdowns and recessions. Yeah, it's very different questions because we're a very unusual travel business. We're very defensive travel business because we sell discounted stuff to a great degree. So we keep expecting a slowdown. We haven't seen it yet in a sense. We slightly benefit from cyclical slowdowns and that a big part of the cost of a trip is flights. So flight if oil price drops, if flight costs, if flight supply comes online, that makes the overall trip less. So people, there's a degree of elasticity in travel. So if flight cost is expensive, there's nothing that we can control. You naturally have a diminution and an innovation in demand. So as that happened, it actually kind of helps us in a round about way. And also as hotels get more supply, they're more sort of keen to work with us to help trade profits. So ultimately, we want to see us, we don't want to see Dr. Conn, well, we're going to be collapsed. That's not that sort of too extreme, but a slight sort of call slowdown can actually help us in terms of what we're seeing. We're certainly seeing in certain regions. So Bali's come right off this year. So Bali was record year last year was flying and I'm talking about for us where it was sort of rest of doing fine. But Bali XS is is significantly off just because of strains, probably just being to Bali a lot in the last three years. Thailand is okay. They've got a lot of business from still from Russia Middle East to low Russia starting to dissipate China's really come out of that Asian market. So that's really hurting places like Bali. Chinese travelers and not travelers who Chinese source market. So if you look at Asian last couple of years, they've done very well for all, for basically every travel operator. And we've seen as and that's been on the back of Chinese coming Chinese demand coming back. I've seen that reverse. Yeah. Last six made pre-tariff stuff. So all that stuff actually helps us because we don't sell Chinese source market. So we'd rather see China and Russia. We'd rather say I want the Russia conflict resolved. So start going back to Europe and start going to Asia. So I'm slightly buried on travel generally, but slightly bullish for us if that makes sense. But it's not we're not massively bullish. We're still we're paranoid optimists. So we're always trying to sort of hope for the best but expect the worst. Well, I think most entrepreneurs are paranoid on this in some sense. But yeah, we we are ultimately confident we keep building great products and serve customers really well than the business will do well. And our MPS remains at 70 plus, which is pretty unusual for travel. It's often sort of in the single digits. So we know of keep serving and we don't do it. We don't get it right 100% of the time. We get it right almost 100% of the time. So we've got an incredible customer service team who are tireless at working and do going out of their way to help customers. We said out a lot that our team will go far more out of their way than most travel businesses do to help a customer get what they need or what they want. And we're just sort of keeping trying to keep things as simple as can write a great product, write great service and build a great sort of mechanism to to should be at that. And the business should should do well. Yeah. So that's sort of our formula. Okay. There's just a few things that I want to ask you about. And we're sort of I don't want to keep you too long. But you've also invested in other smaller businesses. And that's been your as a serial entrepreneur and different sort of travel businesses like unyoked. Can you tell me what attracted you to that? And that's the way I go. So based just around the corner here, I just love them. And then there were travel business in a way. They're more of a they're more like a hotel competitor than we actually work with business like that. We sell them not unyoked. We sell other who does similar similar stuff. And they are really like the guys. It's they've done that. You may actually a really good job. This is much bigger than when when we invested in it. And that that was when we just sort of backed the founders, which is really like the founders. I'm really energetic. So they come to you and we're going to introduce to fire someone or someone which is often how it sort of happens. They've got some great investors who are backing them. We're on time to invest. Yeah. And they've done they've done a lot of raising and there are a few times who raised some debt as well. So they got to build the they got to build the sort of cabins. So the serial capital involved there. But then they're they're doing really well on the okay now as well. So they've done a great job in what is a really hard business. And you're still investing in yeah. Yeah. I haven't I haven't invested since I've done a couple of rounds in the company. I'm actually investing in much lately. But do you really my focus now is really like your escapes. Yeah. When I was eight months out of the business, I'll do more investing. And I've had typical hits and misses. So something done really well and some are just sort of died. So which is pretty common in sort of startup investing. Couple of quick questions. What do you reckon you've learned in the last two or three years about your business? I think it's really the power of competitive advantage and what we need to build to become a sustainable business. And that's from listening to podcasts like yours, like acquired, like like like like hearing really smart people talk about that business. I think it's a great way to learn about business. And we really sort of and speaking of my co-hosts, I do a shiftman. I've learned a lot from him and just the benefit of how you think about long term strategy and how to create long term value. And when you come from here as a startup, which is just trying to survive, it's not how you think about the business. Well, exactly. You're thinking in one way is so very short term. It's how do we get to tomorrow? How do we get to next week? But you've got to think long term about competitive advantage and strategy and how to get there. Totally. What have you learned about resilience? Both. And how critical it is to build that in your business. I guess I'm talking from co-overtimes. Yeah. And there's always no. I've always been like, well, I think to be a fan, if you've got to be super greedy and super resilient. So one thing we've actually been pretty good at since they won has been pretty resilient. We had a number of different businesses and had some like, have you had many knocks though to then have to get back up from not for all, but that said, COVID definitely wasn't our toughest time. Like we had tougher times 10 years before COVID, where there's a couple like there's an instance without apartment business in 2006 and instance in 2012 with just like quiddy crunch without current business. That was far more scary than COVID, to be honest. So we'd built resilience pretty early on. So both years and I and that's the benefit of having a sort of co-founder. And that's why I commented, I said, "Forces, you have a co-founder. Is that helps the resilience when there's somebody else sort of in it with you?" Yeah. That's just one thing where I think the most important sort of ingredient for any founder is, are you going to be able to sell, but you've got to be really resilient. What have you learned about yourself as a leader of people? Now you do have a very big, you know, bunch of employees. I think I'm not sure what's learned about myself. These leaders stand on the shoulders of others. The best leaders have the best people who do the work and a great, I see I really just steal to everybody else's credit. So I think to a great extent is just reinforced how important is to have this great team and we've got credit and just looking at my out executive leadership team and an outstanding leadership team beneath the LT and what we try and create is Fander mode across the business. So look at our LT and there are many entrepreneurs themselves, Shime, TTO, he's a founder himself but he's as much of a founder in this business almost that is me. He pushes me in many instances. So I look at all the LT and a very Fander mode team members and SOT very much the same. So it's one thing I really tried to build in the last three years is how do we get the team and it's not for everyone but how do we get as many people in the team as possible thinking like entrepreneur, thinking like a founder and acting like a founder in the business, having given them license to operate like a founder. And is that important or does they become too risk taking? No, I don't think well ultimately you've got checks and balances that people generally come to you to get it authorized or whatever in most cases but no, I don't think you can have it. It's very rare you'd be too too on. If anything gets the other way, people are scared to make a mistake. You have the classic corporate situation where I hope we never get to this point but you work at a big business and there's no motivation to try something because if you stuff it up, you get sacked and if you do well someone else stills a credit. Like I say, we want to try and be as much a meritocracy as possible and how do we create a team of founder like people who are if I get hit by bus tomorrow, I can just jump in and just keep the business going as it is but even if I don't get hit by bus tomorrow, like a lot of the best ideas we have now, I haven't come up with which is different to seven or eight or ten years ago where I also come up with everything or most things. Now it's, oh that's an amazing idea. Let's do it. But also I guess that you're big enough to be able to give credit to somebody else and not think of it. I don't really care for me. I think like as a fan, like when you own the most equity out of everybody, you kind of get the benefit there. So it's I'd much rather have somebody else come up with a great idea than me have to do it because ultimately they're going to come up with better ideas and more ideas than I can. We had a hackathon recently and the idea is just incredible. We have an annual hackathon and I wouldn't come up with any of this stuff. It was an AI, specifically AI driven hackathon and the same that creativity in the and these are team members who sort of worked 48 hours straight, barely slept and come up with these incredible products and features and projects that yeah, no I could have done. So that's makes me much happier and prouder than if I came up with three ideas that we executed. Yeah. What do you reckon has been a key or the key to your scale up? I think there's one, I think it's just getting more right than wrong and really understanding customers and that's something we would do pretty well in the business is we have a pretty good empathy and understanding of what customers want, how customers think, how to work with them. And you're constantly asking them. Yeah, and we're course being there and we have way over investing customer service versus all our competitors. So if you can call us, well that's good because a lot of people complain about having to deal online and there's never a telephone number to ring and there's a cost back. We can see back. So we used, we can see that cost almost the marketing cost. So I was one of, I was in bought a virtual SIM last week and it just didn't work and they said contact us and they just had zero. It was actually impossible to contact them and it was super frustrating and we never, sometimes might like our phones blow up occasionally if they're like a border close or what something or a cyclone happens or a lot or what not. But generally most people either get through to us or get a call back pretty quickly and that's what you want. You want to be able to call 24 hours at 87 days away 365 days a year. That's what you can. We've now got a fast load of team that services Europe. It will also service Australia in the middle of night and they're really good teams. So we want to be really customer focused customer driven and we think we do a decent job there. We can always get better and we can use AI more and get better in the process. But we think with great product, great customer service, solid marketing and we think the business should be successful. Do you have a favorite app you're using? Other luxury escapes obviously. I don't think I'm necessary. I don't think there's one app necessary that I go to more obviously there's like, obviously someone's like WhatsApp I'm using or like God knows how often I die. But in terms of apps that other people think he have there aren't too many. In the business we use it quite a lot. Are you going to chat GPD or perplexity or I'll use perplexity like 20 times a day perplexity is like broken leg and I'm asking constantly medical staff. But I love a perplexity. I don't love open eyes. I do too. But even I could take a photo of my leg. I got my wounds and said can I swim with these wounds and it would tell me he's talking because he's broke his leg and yeah, so hobbled in here on the other side. Yeah, so that was like obviously instead of having to go to a doctor I could and obviously you don't use it as well. I put the photo into perplexity and ask what's going on? I'll chat GPD and like obviously you got to take it with a great assault because there's not some person on the other end but the answer give you actually pretty incredible. It's as you can say you've got stitches still in there. I can see some open wounds. I don't think you should be swimming. But I also love that they give the sources. And you can say oh no well I don't trust that source or that's come from the company's own website so I'll just take that you know I'll look ill swear sort of thing. Yeah, so you're actually actually is my number one now. It's good. Yeah, good. Yeah, mine too. I asked you this five years ago but what do you obsess about right now? Better a baby, a baby. I intend now. Other than luxury skates, I'm pretty just about other than family and lux is probably I got my own podcast as well which I love working on and as you know, everything. Yes, what's the name? Give it a plug. It's called the contrarian. So you've been a great inspiration. And yes, we have great fun. I love to hear myself. It's very different to your podcast. Yes, we talk about just business stuff and give views that other people might not agree with or might not like but we've got a pretty rusted on audience now that they continue to grow. So fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah. So a couple hours a week. Yeah, oh fantastic. Podcasts are great. What's the one thing you would say to a would-be entrepreneur? There's a few things but obviously find the problem to solve and solve the problem that's relevant to you. Don't just try and solve some random problem because you think it exists. And then once you found that problem, go really hard at it. I don't love the sort of side hustle thing. I think once you've got that really big problem to solve, go in for one, every spend six months not working at your corporate job. Go back to the corporate job but really throw you your weight into it. It's pretty hard to get a side hustle right. Like some people do but it's the exception of the rule. So find the problem that you can solve better than anyone else and really go hard at it. Adam Schwab, CEO of luxury escapes. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm Bill Dittau-Kum. To pleasure to be back. I hope you enjoyed Bill Dittau-Kum. Let me know via Twitter and LinkedIn. Better still, let your family, friends and colleagues know by sharing it around your networks. And I'd love you to give it a star rating on Apple Podcast to make it easier for others to find us. Be sure to subscribe as there are plenty of upcoming episodes you don't want to miss. 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