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As huge numbers of people take to the skies, a growing niche of creative businesses are providing clever travel solutions that make flying away even easie. From shipping your kids’ toys to the holiday resort and organising your hen weekend finances to providing on-the-go translation in any country. We meet the inventors…
WORDS BY BARRY MANSFIELD
 Flying with babies makes it difficult to travel light, as essentials like nappies, food, formula and sunscreen quickly add up. Help is at hand for heavily laden parents, however, in the form of Tinytotsaway, a Wigan-based company that lets parents order their child’s necessities online and delivers them directly to their holiday destination.
Pricing starts from £70 (€89) for a 12kg parcel for holidays to Europe. The founder of Tinytotsaway, former nurse and health visitor Sandra Smith, says she now takes more than 100 orders per week, and word is spreading fast. “Our appeal is not just because parents are brand loyal,” she says, “but because a baby’s nutritional needs call for consistency, and local suppliers overseas can’t always deliver the product you need. That’s why planning ahead is essential.”
Sandra Smith from
Tinytotsaway
Smith drew on personal savings to launch the company in 2004, and spent the next 18 months building up the website and approaching potential business partners. Since then she has teamed up with several travel operators, and is talking to firms in France and the Netherlands about the possibility of expanding the service abroad. “We haven’t signed anything yet, but it’s clear that the idea is easily transferable to other European markets,” she says. “After all, French and Dutch travellers face exactly the same challenges as parents from the UK when they go abroad with their children.”
Tinytotsaway.com uses the UPS courier service and can deliver to most countries. “We chose UPS because they hardly ever sub-contract. They take packages all the way, doorstep to doorstep, which is of paramount importance for us, because the value proposition of the business is that the parcel has to arrive exactly when the customer needs it.”
It happens to the best of us. You arrive at the airport on time, only to realise that you left your camera at home, or forgotten to bring a power adapter with you so you can keep your mobile charged up while on your travels, and faced with no other alternative, you’re forced to pay over the odds for a piece of kit from one of the airport’s retail outlets. Karl Moss, founder of Jersey-based gadget site MyMemory.com, thinks he has the answer, and is working to introduce specialised vending machines at airports around Europe, enabling travellers to snap up these last-minute items before they board their flight.
Karl Moss launched MyMemory
10 years ago as a website
selling gadgets
Moss says he is able to control costs and offer low prices by buying in bulk. In addition, the vending machines don’t need staff, meaning total overheads are lower and the products can be sold even cheaper still. On top of that, a stock summary is sent back to head office every night so that Moss and his team can keep track of which items are selling best, which can be promoted, and which products need to be replenished.
MyMemory was launched 10 years ago as a website selling gadgets, funded by Moss with his own personal savings and a contribution from friends and family totalling around £100,000 (€126,000). By the end of the first year he was turning over £1m (€1.3m), and the vending machine venture has been funded through profits from the gadget site. “At the moment, each dispenser is making sales of around £1,000 (€1,300) per month,” he says. “We’re also placing them in major shopping centres, like the Bullring in Birmingham, and in other travel hubs. At the moment we’re talking to Toshiba in Germany about the prospect of teaming up to launch over there. Negotiations can be quite long-winded, but we are making progress, so you’ll probably notice them popping up all over the place at once. The airport authorities in particular have been fantastic, very enthusiastic to embrace the concept.”
London start-up Wigadoo should be music to the ears of anyone given the task with organising a stag or hen weekend, or any other group trip abroad. Planning and organising a large group event can be stressful, with one person generally put in charge of organising everyone, taking money, paying money out and all too often having to meet a shortfall out of their own pocket.
The founders of London
start-up company Wigadoo
With Wigadoo the user sets up an event and their friends are given a set amount of time to sign up, or “pledge”. When enough people have pledged, the site creates a virtual credit card that everyone pays their money into, meaning no single individual is left unfairly holding the purse strings, thus hugely simplifying the whole process and ensuring that nobody is left feeling hard done by.
The founders, including current marketing chief Uma Rajah, came up with the idea for the site when they were studying at France’s INSEAD Business School two years ago. “We did a lot of travelling with our friends, ranging from ski weekends in the Alps, to visiting the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia,” says Rajah. “The difficulties of organising a group of friends to travel really hit home.”
Wigadoo’s Series A funding round came fundamentally from contacts met at INSEAD, but the team were also recently very grateful to secure an undisclosed investment from Lastminute. com founder Brent Hoberman. “What really helped us is the fact that the European angel investor community is a small clique, so word travels quickly,” explains Rajah.
To cover the costs of collecting money and creating the online event account Wigadoo charges a booking fee of £1.50 per person, though in future the main revenue stream will be from targeted advertising. Launched at the end of June, Wigadoo is aiming for two million active users in the UK and 10 million globally within its first five years.
Tony Partridge the founder
of CallUma
Launched in March this year, telephone hotline CallUma offers a lifeline to travellers all over the world. It’s a translation and information service that can provide on-the-fly assistance with anything from reporting stolen goods to the police, accessing train timetables, or booking a restaurant table. Uma stands for Universal Multilingual Assistance, and users simply call the number, wait until they’re connected to the multilingual operator they need and then let them know what they need. As well as the translation service, CallUma also offers luggage-tracking, electronic document storage, and a handy service that answers questions by text message.
This multi-lingual personal assistant away from home offers members 24-hour, 365-day telephone interpretation, but is aimed just as much at the French business traveller in Frankfurt as the English holidaymaker in Madrid, with translations available in 120 languages. CallUma managed to achieve this scale by teaming up with the GlobeLink group of companies, which gives it access to an additional 400 professional interpreters who have cut their teeth providing services to the likes of the AA and Norwich Union.
CallUma was set up by CEO Tony Partridge, who came up with the idea three years ago, in Javea, on the east coast of Spain. The service makes its money by charging an annual membership fee, which ranges from £19.50 (€25) to £95 (€120) depending on the level of service you choose. “We have a lot of problems with lost luggage,” says Partridge. “We’ve translated at local police stations for victims of theft, and the number of business travellers who lose laptops and PDAs on their trip is incredible.” But Partridge says the service is not just for emergencies. “In one instance a client was at a business meeting in Germany where the translator didn’t show up. He called us and the entire meeting was translated over the phone.”
PHOTOS: © CORBIS
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