The 18th Century Grand Tour, in 2025. Flight-free travel, with Cat Jones, CEO at ByWay.

0:06The purpose was to bring flight-free holidays into the mainstream.

0:30Cat Jones:So whether you're in the world of brand building or the startup ecosystem or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. My name is Matt. I hope you enjoy the show. Kat, thanks so much for joining today. So you are founder and CEO of Byway, which is a travel business all about finding enjoyment in the journey, not necessarily the destination. and you're 100 % flight free. So people are taking holidays by train, by boat. And to give listeners a bit of an understanding, I looked at your website. You have a trip at the moment, which is a train traveling trip across what you call the Renaissance cities in Europe, covering Milan, Paris, etc.

1:13Which looks absolutely wonderful. And this is clearly quite a novel take on travel in the current era. So really excited to hear some more of the insights. Maybe let's just start a little bit about you and if you can just touch on one of the most exciting travel trips you've done in the last few years since starting Byway. Good question. Hi Matt, it's lovely to be here. I've done lots of really exciting trips. I would say maybe one of the ones that sticks out in memory, mainly because I've got a couple of children who are seven and nine and it's the one that they talk about lots, so it gets jogged in my memory.

1:48It was a big loop. We live in London, so we started on the Eurostar and we went out into Germany on the train and we stayed in Ulm which is a lot of what we do at Byway is about surfacing places that are a little bit more off the beaten path and not your kind of standard places that might be airport hubs that lots of people are going to all of the time so we had a really lovely three or four days in a beautiful walled town in Germany with lovely river and lots of ice cream and walks and history. And then we went back the way we'd come into Stuttgart to get on a sleeper train at the children's bedtime.

2:26And actually the sleeper train did go through Ulm at about 11pm, but we booked it through Byway and Byway said, oh, given that you've got the children, you probably want to go back up the road and get on at bedtime instead of joining a bit later. The children went to sleep and we left. We'd had dinner in Stuttgart, so very urban Germany, and got on the sleeper, which was an adventure. It was a bit like really good camping. And so it was lots of fun for us and our family. And went all the way down through out of Germany into Slovenia. Woke up at about half past six for breakfast in the Slovenian countryside.

2:59And had croissants and I had a coffee and the girls had orange juice. And we got off at the stop for Lake Bled. And we were paddling in the water of Lake Bled by half past eight that morning. and it was just that kind of transformation from Germany to Slovenia while we were asleep and then we went down from there and we went into Croatia and then we caught the boat into Venice and up through Italy and the Alps on the way home so it was just magic. What did your kids love about it? Is it the variety? It's huge variety yeah I mean we always talk about these trips being very experienced dance we're doing lots of different types of things we're quite an outdoorsy active family So we like to do the walking bits and the cycling bits and the swimming bits.

3:44And yeah, I think my children particularly love all the swimming. But it's the pace, I think, for us. You're getting on the train from home and then you're just on holiday that whole time. I think we did about two, just over two weeks. And the whole time you're on holiday and when you get back on the train, if it's a daytime train, we've got games and we play Uno and we have a picnic on the train and you pause for lunch. and it's just holiday all the way through. You haven't got any travel to get anywhere. Like all of the travel is part of the holiday. So you're not one of those founders that when you take a holiday, which are hard-earned, that you just sit on the beach and chill.

4:19You're always on. Yeah, that's what we like. We like to be out and about and doing things. And I suppose I'm spending my holidays on byway trips, so I have WhatsApp support teams of all the people I work with saying, how's it going? So you touched on the product in a couple of different ways, But one thing I want to pick up on is you mentioned because you had the kids, the system understood that and rerouted you based on things that would suit your family needs. Can you just talk through the product and actually what's happening in terms of the intelligence layer behind? Yeah, so we're a tech company and our challenge has been, so I guess if we go back to 2020 COVID when I set up the business, the purpose was to bring flight free holidays into the mainstream.

5:01So I've never owned a car and I've always enjoyed this kind of travel. I used to have time to do it and do all the plans and work it all out and figure out the route and book all the tickets and then had children and found that I didn't have the time to do that anymore. so setting up the business the point was let's put it on the map again let's bring back the idea of journey-based travel and not just travel as a means to an end of getting to a place but going back to the journey and the multi-stop and the multi-mode or with the idea that actually if people knew this was an option and that it was possible to do it actually quite easily then lots of people would do it and they'd tell their friends to do it and that was my grand hypothesis so it meant that when we built the company we built it with two arms one was let's build this brand that can stand for that kind of travel and that can tell those wonderful rich experience rich stories and make people think oh I never thought of using trains for a holiday that sounds cool but then let's also build the tech that underpins that and that partly that's functional right that's the bit that says we can get real-time availability from APIs and we can automatically book tickets and you can take out the legwork of booking 13 different tickets and seat reservations and what kind of pass do you use an interrail pass or all of that complexity can be simplified but it was also the bit where we wanted to say it's not just a functional system but it's a magical system that allows you to take a trip that is optimized for enjoyment and that it can be personalized to you and you're not going to enjoy exactly the same things as other people so how do we create actually a really intelligent routing engine that that has lots of local insight underneath it.

6:39So we know we don't offer every place in the world or even in Europe, but the places that we do offer, we know them very well. So we can start matching this place to this customer, this person in this context and bubble up what is going to be a real highlight for them. And that can be places and it can be journeys. And the tech then is about how do we route that and how do we introduce additional things that are going to be wonderful stopovers or wonderful scenic routes where you don't take the most direct route. Maybe it takes longer, but you get these incredible alpine views. So the tech was really the project, and it took us 18 months of trying to build this technology before we ever created a trip that was better than the one the human would have built.

7:20So lots of our business is about humans who know this stuff really well, teaching this technology how to do this at scale on its own. So how do you understand your customers when they first come to you and they might be a family, they might have different interests and requirements. How do you actually ingest all of that information? And then on the supply side, you mentioned that you're taking people to maybe off the beaten track places and areas. How are you actually validating that those are interesting places to see? Yeah. So I guess part one is how does the person come and how do we discover who they are and what context they're in?

7:55So there are a few different ways that we do that. We have, if you went on the byway.travel website, you'd see various itineraries that we've put in. So you mentioned one at the beginning where you can get a shape of a trip and some of the journeys and places. So often people will come and they'll browse and they'll choose one or we've got quite a complex search where you can search. I want sleeper trains in it and I've got about this long and these are the sorts of regions. So you can surface almost jumping off point trips that you can start from and then you can edit your train times and your accommodation choices and things like that.

8:28So that's one way of knowing. The other is we launched last year, actually early this year, we launched Byway Map, which is where somebody can come in and actually say, I already know one or two places that I want to go to. And I'm interested now if I go overland and make a journey of this, what else might magic up? And then there's the obvious stuff, like they're searching with two children or in a family room and those sorts of things that you can build a picture of. And then we also have a significant amount of what we do is via our team. So we have a concierge team and we also have a hello at byway.travel email address, which is where people write in with whatever they fancy.

9:03And often that could be like, I really liked this trip, that trip, that thing. I hate it when I go on this sort of thing. What have you got for me? And that's then where often our team who have that additional layer of expertise will then use our tech and our tools to be able to match this quite unstructured context from a customer into something that our technology can work with. And then the second part of the question was about the supply side and how do we know which places are good? So some of that comes from hiring experts who live there and know these places. But the bigger we get, the less we know about everywhere.

9:38And we don't have deep personal expertise of having lived in these places. So one of the things that's very important to our business is partnering with DMOs, Destination Management Organizations, basically tourist boards, who know their regions very well. And they also know where are the places in the region that lots of people come and actually the place doesn't really want all of those people at the same time arriving in this sort of way. And where are the places that would really love and welcome and appreciate lots of people in their region spending money into the local economy and all that sort of thing.

10:07So we get a really good lens there. And then we also work closely with local journalists as well, particularly people who are writing in that region, who know travel very well, who often are overland travellers as well. And so partnering with these third parties, I suppose, to build out our knowledge and to help train the system to the local nuances is really important part of setting any region live in the technology. So it's a really nice human concierge meets digital solution. Tell me a little bit more about this insight when you started the business. So you mentioned that this has always been the way that you travel.

10:43Family doesn't own a car. But actually, what gave you the confidence in the macro to go to this? It's almost like an 18th century grand tour revision in a sense, because I guess the world we live in today over the last probably couple of decades has been about destination first. It's speed to destination and then you sit on the beach and you chill out. You've taken a completely different approach. So maybe if we just rewind to that insight and understanding of validating the macro. Yeah. So I think for me it was I mean, it was like a big bet, I suppose. Lots of people thought I was mad. I remember our first bit of national press was in The Guardian.

11:23It was, if I paraphrase, it said something like, crazy lady sets up travel business in global lockdown and look at this stuff she's doing. I mean, it was very positive, but it was, there were a lot of people thinking, gosh, you're mad to try and think people could do this on trains. I think for me, it was tracing that arc, actually, of, as you said, like, this is always what travel used to be, right? It always used to be journey-based. There wasn't a different option. It wasn't very accessible. It was a slice of the market that could afford to travel. And it was not a personal experience of travel either.

11:53It was like a grand tour that you could go on that was a set route. But I think I was watching certainly the evolution of tech. So before I set up Byway, I was an investor, a tech investor. And looking at the evolution of the technology and particularly of the dynamic packaging technology that came in the 1990s, where you had your last minute dot coms, your kayaks. But you can combine any flight with any accommodation and you can make all your own decisions in real time with real time data. And suddenly when you pair that technical innovation with the innovation in terms of price and access that suddenly opened up the market for travel and said, fly to place, get holiday, come back and do that really flexibly and make it work for you and choose your accommodation and all of that.

12:35So I suppose at the point that happened, we lost the journey based option almost like it almost wasn't an option anymore. because the flight-based option was so easy and so cheap that, and I suppose the journey-based alternative when you're trying to plan it yourself, is very complex and it's fraught with risk as well because if you've got your plan and something goes wrong with one component, you've got knock-ons and that can have, you know, you could be stuck trying to find another night of accommodation or a different ticket on the day. So I suppose my insight, what my bet was that actually if we, now that the tech has evolved, to be able to dynamically package up all of these different elements.

13:12If we can extend that technology so that we can make it as easy to do that with multiple trains and boats and buses and accommodation that's distributed in space, it's not all one airport-linked hub that you're swapping accommodation, but you can swap accommodation from one place to a different place on a different train line. If we can extend the tech in that way, and then we can say, actually, it's also personal now, so it doesn't have to be the same as everyone else and off the shelf. you can tailor that to what you want and what you're looking for, then suddenly people have got a choice that can compete with the fly and flop sort of option of go to place, get holiday, come back.

13:49And we could say actually have a rich journey-based experience, put multiple holidays in one. So we sell a package holiday, which means then when the customer pays for that, if anything goes wrong, that's on us to fix that, right? We give them their new tickets. We give them a full refund if we can't operate the trip for any reason. So you remove the risk. And then it's really easy for somebody to choose this kind of thing instead of flying. And luckily, when we did that, we found that actually was the case. And most of our customers are people who normally fly. And 90 % of our customers coming home say, I'll do it again, or I'll tell my friends and get them to do it.

14:23And maybe let's just drill down on your demographics. Who are your users? Who's coming to Byway? And in terms of the actual journey-based travel, what things are you seeing that they absolutely love, which maybe you didn't think would be true from the outset. So maybe some people just don't like flying or there's a sustainability angle. Maybe some people come because they want to see multiple different things and places and do different things. But maybe some people actually just love sitting in a chair and looking out of the window on a train. Who's coming to you and what are they really coming to you for?

14:53Yeah, so the biggest psychographic group is people who are coming to do something a little bit different from the standard thing, right? They like the idea of exploring. I think exploring is a big thing. And I suppose the thing that the second part of your question was what the bit of our product we didn't realise was going to be in our product was. And the biggest one is the WhatsApp support that we provide. So when I was first in 2020, we were doing our very first trips and it was me and our intern Lizzie who were basically putting together trips by hand. And we were just saying, let's see, let's send people on some trips and just see what happens and whether they like them.

15:34So we put in WhatsApp groups with everybody because I was the founder of this new thing and I wanted to learn what do they think. So I'll be on WhatsApp with them and we'll find out what they're saying. and they ended up using the whatsapp groups mainly to show off their holiday photos and to show off the videos of what they were up to and occasionally to say we would say your train's running late here's your new ticket for the connecting service and it's at this time or whatever but the when they came home they were writing five star reviews and almost always it was because of the whatsapp thing and we really liked cat and lizzie and we just loved having someone there to share this journey with us and we really appreciated them sorting anything out if we were running a bit late or whatever but in the end we just we just all made friends and we had a really nice time and so for us we suddenly were going oh that's actually a really important part of the service is that we do have this kind of support it's not it's not a guided tour we're not with you you're doing it yourself and you're exploring but we're there we're back up if you want us or if you want to just if you've gone off to Europe and suddenly you don't know what a train number is you can ask us and we're there so I suppose that was then the insight actually let's not turn off these whatsapp group so we have a whole in-trip support team who are on whatsapp with our traveling customers because of that little bit of support and backup and just a friendly person on the end of a whatsapp it allows people who want to explore but don't want to be completely exploring on their own it gives them freedom to come and say oh great someone's got this and i can actually be a bit more exploratory and adventurous than i've ended up being historically for holidays and that feels really good i thought it was going to be that in in a sense a safety net for those people but But actually, part of what you were saying was that they send you photos.

17:13It's almost like social currency. Can you decipher between those two different things? Because they're quite distinct. I think it's a very human interaction. It's quite hard to untangle them because it's the team that you have on WhatsApp when you're on a bi-ray trip. It's a team that is really friendly, is there for any kind of questions. You can just have a chat. You can wing over some pictures. And you're always getting somebody nice at the other end of it. And they're checking in on how your holiday is. if there's a problem they're sorting it and they're quick and they have lots of knowledge but it's if you went through like if you go to trust pilot around five star reviews and that's always been the case but that very often it is about the people on whatsapp and we get name checks from the team and it's that especially because some of our trips are longer right like you wouldn't do a byway trip that's less than four days long and our sweet spot is a week to 10 days is where really that's where a lot of our trips are happening so that's time to meet a few people and have a few chats and interactions and it is a lot of that is just sharing the holiday experience so it's very often you're not seeing the team as backup so much as just another person who's along for the ride and bailing you out if needed.

18:24So as a part of your brand it's very personal it's very human how would you describe your brand how do you think about brand? Yeah very human that's really that and I suppose it goes back to that piece about the local insight is so important like you can't optimize a route for enjoyment if you don't know the places and the journeys really well so that piece where the people are always teaching the tech and always guiding the tech and where we won't 60 % of our trips that we sell are led by the technology and 40 % aren't and that's really important to us is that we always have that kind of protection for the ones that the tech's not ready to do yet because it hasn't learned enough yet from us and We haven't trained it enough and it's not had enough people go on these trips and give us their real experiences to pair with our kind of expert experiences.

19:11So I think it's a human accessible brand. We're not going to be a brand that's going to put you in a hold queue when you're trying to talk to us. It's we're here and we're available and the other side of the brand is just the delight. Yes, it's amazing for the climate when you travel like this. and we've got a carbon price on all our trips and we've got a carbon saving on any trip that you build or any trip that you can see all of that and that is absolutely a kicker for lots of our customers and they'll get a warm fuzzy feeling about the climate thing and often when they get home from their trip and we send their round up that says you've gone to this many places and you've travelled this many miles and you've saved this much carbon it's often a reason that they buy the second trip but almost always the first trip is because because wow, it sounds like a real interesting adventure.

20:00It sounds delightful. We have so many people now who have a bucket list of I've heard of this place or I saw this place that my friend went on, that I saw on Instagram, all the pictures, and I've had that in my head for 14 months that I want to do that. And then suddenly you go, oh, hang on, I could put that in the trip and that in the trip and that in the trip. And actually I could do three of the things I've already wanted to do all in the same 10 days that I'm out. That's quite exciting. So it sounds like your customers aren't necessarily the folks who are saving up for years to do this big exploration.

20:31It sounds like maybe they're doing it more frequently. And I'd love to talk about repeat and how you think about driving repeat, because you mentioned it in your brand. It's being, it's really personal, it's really human, whereas a lot of the industry is quite transactional. You just booked the cheapest flight from A to B. You booked the hotel that's cheapest and probably in the right location on various different platforms. You're trying to do something really different. So how do you think about repeat? And from a customer perspective, how frequently are they traveling with you? And is that all of their travel basket for the year?

21:02Or are they also doing some destination based travel as well? Yeah, lots of them are doing destination based travel, not necessarily with us. We won't book you three nights in Paris on the Eurostar. You might as well do that yourself. Where we add the value is where you are going a little bit further, a little bit more places. You've got more exploring to do and more support that might be needed. so I suppose in terms of repeats on average we're seeing once a year is about right for our repeating so we'll have more frequent than that if people are doing a five day as well so sometimes we'll have somebody who might have done a longer trip they might do 10 days around Europe if they're coming from the UK for example and then they might also be doing a sleeper train to Scotland and a couple of days here and a couple of days there and home on the sleeper as well so we'll have a kind of higher frequency, I suppose.

21:56But again, not really more than a couple of trips a year, even then, because a lot of what you're doing when you choose a byway holidays, you put more time to it and you almost stitch multiple holidays together. There's quite a lot out there at the moment of lots of trips in a year. And what you do with byway is you're almost taking lots of those together at one time for actually quite a long, nice disconnect. So is this a trend in the industry where people are doing less frequent but bigger trips? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a trend that we're seeing. And it's one of the trends that I think is underpinning lots of the growth of the business.

22:35You know, we're growing two to three times year on year. And a lot of that is coming from this mindset. But I think at the same time, you also have the accelerating trend in the opposite direction. It is true that you are seeing more and more short breaks happening. And that's easier and easier and more and more accessible. So what I think we are starting to see is it's almost a reaction to that as well, where people are, I suppose there's so much of pace in life and you do work fast and you get holidays fast and you do lots of things and lots of things. and I suppose what Biway is providing is a bit of a challenge to that to say why don't you step out of your door onto a train and then be on holiday for quite a period and do some different things and get out of your comfort zone a little bit and have an explore and and I suppose one of the reasons that's so attractive for people is because it is so different to what life feels like a lot of the time right and actually to what travel feels like is is travel the way that it often is now in the mainstream is it is a more transactional idea of travel where travel isn't the travel bit as much as it's the bit you do when you get to the place and the travel bit's kind of a means to an end and I think this is this type of trip is a reaction to some of that and it seems to be resonating.

23:54No it really appeals to me. So let's quickly talk about the infrastructure so So the scale, the ambitions that you have, you want to become a very large company. And this is complete recency bias, having just recently been on a UK South Coast train. Right, it's a bad experience. So across Europe, what needs to happen from an infrastructure perspective to make sure that you can scale to the size of company that you want to be? It's a good question. I think there are obviously a lot that we could do with in terms of infrastructure for rail in particular. There used to be such great infrastructure for rail travel.

24:30If you were going to Cornwall on a Grand Riviera tour in the 70s, your bag would be taken from you in London and it would be waiting for you when you got to your place in Cornwall. Well, our rail system is engineered for commuters and with its various challenges when you're commuting too. But the leisure traveller is still, and that's not just in the UK, like this is one of the things that we're working with the TOCs, like the train operating companies, is to help integrate this idea that actually leisure travel on trains is such an exciting thing and it's accelerating and more and more people want to do it.

25:05So let's really start paying attention to what would make leisure travel super amazing. So there's certainly that conversation with the operating companies, but there's also the conversation with the governments and the policymakers about, you know, there are huge tax reliefs for aviation and air-based holidays, which makes them artificially inexpensive. And we would love to see some of that diverted into rail. And let's put some more money behind this and allow climate friendly travel to get the same level of support that air gets from governments and policymakers. And then I suppose the final part to that.

25:42So, yes, there's lots to do in terms of infrastructure. But the lovely thing is that Byway is already an infrastructure that solves for a lot of those problems. Right. So one of the reasons we built the tech as we have is because of some of these challenges. And lots of people like this idea of a night train or an overnight ferry that you can take is a lovely experience. Lots of people want to do it. And it's true that some of these tickets go on sale quite late and they sell out quite quickly. And you can't always get exactly that train that you want. But what you can do and what we've done is you build the technical system that can juggle all of that around.

26:21And then you're starting to route that together and you've got eight days to play with. then it actually doesn't matter to you whether the sleeper train on Tuesday is full because there's a sleeper train on Thursday and so you can put the sleeper segment in between this place and that place and if that one sells out then you've still got an opportunity to do it somewhere else actually on a different line and there's actually a huge amount of flexibility in the way that you design these routes and the order that you put things in and the places that you choose to prioritize because there's such a tapestry of choice and delight that you can cope actually with quite a lot of infrastructural challenges on the ground because you have this layer over the top that simply juggles them all, gets the availability and says, OK, given that, what's a really delightful way to route this trip?

27:05And that's what we do. And that's why I suppose Bioway is making it easy to allow this market to grow despite the infrastructure not always having quite caught up to it. So your tech enables you to smooth over things like a train cancellation. It'll reroute you and all those kind of things. I just want to come back to your point earlier about policy. I know that was specific to the UK, but I'm curious why you think policymakers are so slow to provide positive benefit to rail, given the sustainability benefits. And there's a lot of chat clearly about net zero at the moment. Is it that the customer demand for sustainable travel just is not yet big enough?

27:45Or is it that you think the government actually don't really care or something else? it's hard to get into the why isn't it you can see the output more easily than you can put in further reasons i would say there is an awful lot of money that goes into economies based on air right because that is such a standard way to travel so it's quite a challenge for people who like all that money flowing through air when you start challenging air and the investment especially when you know that at the moment leisure travel on trains and ferries is the underdog and even the train operating companies see the commuter as their primary not all of them but lots of train operating companies will see the commuter as the primary person you've got people saying we want to travel more on trains and that's like gaining momentum and you have more people saying and choosing to do this for sustainability reasons but also lots of people choosing to do it just because it's more fun and it's more nice as an experience to do.