Face-to-face: Steffen W. Frølund, CEO of Bownty.co.uk
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What does Bownty do?
We help consumers find and buy the best value-for-money experiences. You can use Bownty for restaurants, weekend getaways or concert tickets, just like you can use momondo for plane tickets. We’ve been around since 2011 and cover more than 1,200 cities across Europe.
Why are travel deals so important to include on the site?
There are essentially two reasons. First, we see a huge demand for short weekend getaways and city breaks. We help the customer by sorting travel deals into smaller categories such as holidays, city breaks and weekend getaways. We’re also a valuable tool to find inspiration about a new city to which the customer might want to travel. Getting access to locally rated experiences with a discount while abroad is a great proposition. Our customers love that.
Who’s your typical user?
It really depends on our categories. We generally find that more women are planning and shopping on Bownty than men. We see couples buying city breaks, whereas our younger users have the tendency to use us as a tool to make last minute weekend plans or to fill a night out with the best and cheapest social setting.
Which markets worldwide are strongest for Bownty?
We were founded in Copenhagen, which remains our core market. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to internationalize this business quite rapidly. Today, Spain and the United Kingdom are close runners up. Italy and the Netherlands are showing great momentum, but still have some way to go, to beat the others in terms of revenue and usage.
How do you work with travel deal providers?
As a meta-search / aggregator we source all our content from a wide variety of partners. We currently have more than 160 independent experience content providers. We present their offerings and they pay us a commission when one of our users makes a purchase.
Bownty is a deals meta-search site, at a time when there has been criticism of there being too many deals sites. How would you counter this?
We cover much more than daily deals – and from a customer perspective, can there really be too many deals? The more offers, deals and experiences sold online the better for the customers and for Bownty. It might be a pain finding your way around the thousands of things to do in a city but that’s exactly where Bownty enters. We want to help the customer decide and enjoy the fun parts more. By hand-picking deals that we believe are relevant to our customers and presenting them through a variety of inspiring themes, we try to move away from the notion that we are just another deal site.
What are your goals for growing your business in the UK market and why?
We’re planning on doubling year over year. The UK market for us will be a key contributor to that goal.
What is the potential to grow your client base globally – what are the challenges and opportunities?
The hard job for us is getting our message across to busy consumers who are being bombarded with information every day. On the other hand, we believe we have a product most people use in their everyday lives, so they’ll immediately catch our value when they learn about us. We really look at the people who are experiencing a new city to enable them to get a really good experience for the best value possible. Bownty is an excellent tool for the customer who wants to make the most out of their stay. There are some interesting partnerships lined up for us in this business area.
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