E336 | EUVC | Achievement of The Year Finalist: On resilience and making difficult decisions - TourRadar's story

0:00Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the European BC Podcast. Today, I have a very special episode with you. We are joined by Travis Pittman from TourRadar, the founder and CEO there, and also Chris Waite from Isomer Capital. And we're talking about how Travis and the team at TourRadar really managed to live through COVID and actually survive, actually come out on the other side much, much stronger. And we're having this conversation because we had Travis and the team at TourRadar as one of the achievement of the year finalists in the European VC Awards. And I just could not do this episode after hearing about the story and hearing about how Travis navigated this.

0:40So this is an episode really about how a founder and an investor thinks about navigating through very tough times, obviously very painful personnel cuts, very painful changes in everything around the business. And I really think that this is just a conversation that goes beyond what we normally do here on the European VC podcast. So I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we did having it. And also a huge shout out to our good friends at HSBC Innovation Banking for sponsoring the award of Achievement of the Year, because without sponsors like HSBC Innovation Banking, we would not exist. So do make sure to check them out and consider if that's where you should take your banking business.

1:24Here's a few words from our beloved sponsor. Welcome to the European VC podcast, featuring the finalists in the achievement of the year category at the European VC Awards, proudly sponsored by HSBC Innovation Banking. HSBC Innovation Banking partners with innovators and investors, offering flexible banking solutions to ignite the bold ideas that reshape our world. From managing cash flow to supporting growth plans, HSBC Innovation Banking powers ideas at every stage of their journey. Their commitment to the venture capital community is exemplified through initiatives like the Newton Venture Programme, training the investors of tomorrow.

2:02As Stephen Lowry, head of investor coverage and business development at HSBC Innovation Banking UK says, the European VC Awards are a great opportunity to recognise those individuals that are committed to the ecosystem and pushing the boundaries forward.

2:51This show is not investment advice. and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Travis, Chris, welcome to the European Easy Podcast. Great to be here. Great to be here. Andres. Yeah. So as I just said in the intro, this is going to be a bit of a different episode because we're going to be talking about TourRadar and the journey that TourRadar has been through because going through COVID and the tech reset and everything, it has been a massively interesting journey. And actually, this whole conversation came up because we, in the beginning of our conversations around the European VC Awards, came to talk about everything you've done, Travis, with TourRadar.

3:33Because Chris said, this is definitely a finalist in the category of achievement of the year, because you've done such an incredible work in just navigating through the COVID period and the tech reset period. So massive congratulations on that. I think it's incredibly important to recognize. Thank you. Yeah, definitely. The few gray hairs were not here beforehand. So a few stories to tell that caused those. So yeah, happy to be here. I'm deeply encouraged. You have a really great smile on today. So that's fantastic. After so many years of building this company, that's great to hear. And we will definitely dive in here to a conversation that will show why why smile maybe wasn't on the lips every day but travis just to make sure everyone that's listening in understands what tour raider is maybe you would just tell us a bit about first how you come to came to found tour raider but also but also what is tour raider uh so maybe uh to kick off what is tour raider so we're a platform for organized adventures so think of a multi-day travel experience so the fun stuff uh kayaking or hiking or safaris wherever it might be in the world uh and we've we've brought the the best tour operators uh from literally the entire planet into one platform uh aggregated for customers to search find and book uh any of those particular adventures and so they're high basket size so $3 ,000,$4 ,000 type experiences.

5:09So there's a lot of trust needed. And basically a platform like ours is missing for this particular space. And the story actually started around 2005. I was living in London with my brother, Sean, who's the co-founder of TourRadar. And we booked a sailing holiday in Croatia and actually turned up. So booked through a US website that I thought, okay, I'm going to be the savvy one and organize this for my friends. and uh obviously things were a bit different back then we all turned up in trieste in italy uh 12 of us and uh there was no one there uh literally no no transfer nothing we called the number in the u.s no answer uh i'd wired five thousand us dollars to them uh and basically like oh i've just lost all my friends money uh so anyway there was a happy ending to the story uh we caught an overnight bus to Zadar, to the marina where we were supposed to pick it up.

6:05The provider was there, but it was a completely different name. And they were like, where have you been, Mr. Pittman? We've been waiting for you. And so it was from that kind of whole thing was that Sean and I definitely thought there was a better way and a more trustworthy way of doing this. So like 24-7 customer support, payments that you can trust, obviously you pay in your local currency, social proof of reviews things like that are really key to the platform uh that we made sure from that one experience kind of came out of it so yeah that's it's been a a long journey uh but yeah happy today to share some of those uh stories and more stories along the way so and i don't know whether now's the right time but you've evolved a lot in terms of your offering and some of that sort of informed by customers some of that informed with different travel patterns post covid etc maybe a word on that yeah for sure so in the beginning uh we started with the more what you call like the global tour operator brands uh so like intrepid travel or g adventures or contiki a lot of people have kind of heard of those brands they're companies who run tours all over the world uh what you actually find is that there's a a thing called a dmc which is the destination management company who are the tour operators on the ground who run the experience for those global tour operators and what we've seen is that we've given basically a democratization or ability for these dmcs to offer their services globally through a platform like ours whereas previously they couldn't because they had to go through a tour operator to get that distribution or through a travel agent.

7:44So yes, we now list 2 ,500 different tour operators and about 2 ,300 of those are these DMC type operators who are the locals in those destinations. And that's really the differentiating factor that we've built over the last years. And to your point, Chris, the one key change that we did see, or two key changes, people wanted a bit more private and personalized experiences. And so we built out the functionality for any customer to say, hey, I like this tour, but I want it to be for me or my family or my group, and I want it customized. And that now makes up about 15 % of our business. And that's for the more higher end experiences of like 10 ,000, 15 ,000 type euro bookings.

8:29And that's really definitely a growing segment. And we're really looking to increase and obviously double down on that over time as well. I'm sure we have a ton of people listening in to whom that offering sounds like a pretty good one because we're all too busy to deal with our recations, to be honest. So, Travis, maybe let's also, so now we know about the product and the offering and the platform, but maybe you could tell us a bit about the funding journey because you've got some very notable investors, of course, one of which being, of course, Isomer. but tell us like when did you get your first funding round and a bit about the journey up to today yeah so we took our first round we bootstrapped for quite a while and our first funding round was in 2014 where speed invest so we took some angels on in 2013 but then the first financial one was with speed invest out of austria that's where i'm actually based in vienna um and so oliver holler holler was one of the first ones who came on board uh and then over the last year so in 2015 hoxton came on which is uh when the the isomer team sort of started to obviously take note as well and yeah cherry ventures came on in that round for our series a as well so hoxton and cherry combined and then endite capital out of the netherlands they did our Series B round and then TCV came in for our Series C round in 2018.

9:57And those are all pretty impressive Tier 1 VCs by choice or, you know, just out of interest to dig into that for a minute, because, you know, Speed Invest have been around a long time. They've got a superb reputation. They're European-wide. hoxton you know uh one of the premier sort of early stage funds in europe as well as is cherry and endite and of course tcv knows needs no introduction but this is an interesting trend that you chose these very high end vcs yeah i think the way i really try and look at this is where's the cultural fit also not just with me but with the company and and kind of the the beliefs And that really helped shape as well as the track record that those firms had of who we wanted to go with.

10:53So obviously, consumer is a big element of that. Like I said, Sherry brought that from the Zalando type days. That was definitely something interesting. Hoxton obviously brought the Google sort of side of it as well and a bit more of the deep tech thing. So it was really interesting on that front. And TCV, they were definitely with the track record that they have out of the US into travel companies and their pedigree there. So actually, the deal for TCV kind of came about because of Eric Blatchford. Eric was the angel investor kind of in our 2013 or 14 round when Speedinvesting joined. And Eric was basically one of the founding members of Expedia.

11:38So he came out of Microsoft. off they formed Expedia uh he was CEO I think the second CEO they had after Rich Barton and then uh Dara actually took over from Eric uh so Eric brought that uh pedigree of travel uh which then kind of TCV came in because of that so yeah it's been uh definitely and on the endite side they brought obviously a lot of media and and also that kind of B2C side uh from the end of all group and And so, yeah, it kind of all tried to match the vision of where we were going and the type of company we were wanting to build and definitely helped us shape with the investors that we brought on as well.

12:16There's something I definitely want to talk about, but we'll do that in the end because it's the proverbial AI topic. And I always find it so interesting to hear how everyone's thinking through the ramifications of AI. But let's leave that as a small bit of this conversation because there's so much to unpack when it comes to your journey. And, of course, being in the space you are with Totoro Rada, COVID could not hit harder, I'm sure. So let's get that. You had a stellar run. You've gotten all the great masters on board. You know, revenue is just growing and everything's perfect. And then comes February 2020, I guess it is.

12:55Well, sorry, I just want to point out just how volatile and difficult this company building business is. You spend the year that you've got your C round and you're iterating the unit economics model and you've finally got the recipe right of how much to spend on marketing and how much to spend on marketing. And January 2020 comes and you hit it out of the park. Let's just focus on that for a second before we go into this, because that was a beautiful moment. And, of course, we didn't know what February and March would bring, right? And so it's worth focus. That was all that energy, that additional capital, isn't an automatic reason for a company being successful.

13:42In fact, we have examples where too much money just destroys a company, actually. You were iterating that whole economic process. To tie something to that, because we had BIMCAR and Atlantic Labs for a conversation around their journey. And they had the exact opposite experience because they also got in the growth capital. And then they just couldn't make it work. The unit economics wouldn't work. The marketing initiatives that actually fell in new customer accounts, even though they increased massively their burnout. Well, that's my point. It's not obvious. No, it's not obvious at all. And I just, I think bringing that up in this connection is super interesting.

14:25So Travis, to you, you hit everything perfectly in January. No, we didn't. So yeah, I can talk to that. Yeah. So that was definitely as to what Chris is alluding to. Like we took on the TCV funds and we've scaled things up. In hindsight, we didn't do that well, you know, in the beginning. Like, so when you're actually starting to scale and spend money like crazy, you're not really looking at the unit economics and the return on ad spend and everything the way you should. And that definitely what Chris is alluding to is that Q3, we started to basically fix that. so we said q3 19 i'm talking about here um and then q3 and then q4 we're starting to come good and then yeah literally january uh 2020 was the best month it was profitable like you know it was basically okay we've we've now we've turned that around and uh i actually went to egypt for like five days because it was so intense that six month period i needed a break you know so i went to egypt uh went to sharm el shake and did like a dive course and switched off everything literally switched off everything and uh this is like mid february uh came back and turned on everything and it was just meltdown like literally so then so then i was like ah shit you know all that work what now i have to what do we have to do now so but uh yeah to uh to the point the really what we saw was from the unit economics point of view is that when you're trying to get uh traction typically as a b2c company there's obviously different levers you can pull one we were pulling uh too too hard was actually the discounting side so we felt we needed to discount on top of you know the the price basically to try and attract customers uh and after you know we've switched the unit economics around it showed that we didn't actually need to do that we'd come we thought we were addicted to that drug and we kept doing it because we're like we don't want to turn this off because it might affect our growth and everything like that.

16:23When we actually turned it off, we didn't see any effect in conversion rates, things like that. It's slightly affected, but not as drastic as what we thought. And so that 3 % that you're maybe giving away, that's 20 % of your net revenue. You're literally kind of giving away to customers. And that being back in your pocket and the bottom line really starts to help build upon when you add travel insurance in there, you get an additional margin, you add a bigger AOV. So that increases also. And it's this incremental improvement that we really worked on over that six to nine month period. And then obviously during COVID as well, that really helped turn us around the economics.

17:00I'm not sure, just to be fair here, that it was possible to know that, you know, without having gone through a certain amount of pain. Yes. Yeah. You mean COVID or do you mean? No, no, no. I mean, you know, sort of because experimentation of those levers is fundamental, isn't it? Or are you really saying you just got it all wrong? No, I think it has to be experimental. it's experiments for sure i think it's knowing or having the courage to to test at certain stages to try and get you off things that you know are not good fundamentally longer term i think that's the the courage to sort of say okay there's a point we need to take this decision test it and then see if we can but in the beginning you need to do everything you possibly can to get it off the ground.

17:50And that's what we were doing, basically. Fantastic. But February did happen. Yeah. February. Yeah. So we can talk about that if you want. I was about to say, let's go to February. You're coming home from Shamal Shake, you're turning on the computer and everything is about them. I don't think too many have been that close to, or even close to a company building in the travel industry. For that reason i think it's interesting just to dwell a bit on those very first days what were the days like what what did you do what did you all think because it really it really blew up right the the one thing people kind of haven't realized about our sector is that we were not just travel but we were a niche of travel when 97 of our bookings are international like so think about that like airbnb be booking they can benefit from domestic tourism still their borders are you know closed they can still do but literally 97 of our customers were traveling somewhere outside of their border and so clearly that just went to zero and to see each border closing down and then the phones blowing up and everything like that so to see tens of millions of euros of bookings that are in the future like there and you're like what the hell are we going to do with this like it was like how how do we even what do we have to refund everything is it just going and so the team we had war rooms obviously uh the entire day every day kind of running with the leadership team and a wider leadership team as well it was also in the very beginning with the board uh we had daily calls uh to basically work out okay how and what are we going to do to mitigate this there was definitely just complete unknown uh so it was like okay well we have to let the entire company go you know immediately uh to be able to survive this thankfully we were uh we're obviously headquartered here in austria and the austrian government reacted very quickly in terms of things like kurzarbeit which is like short time work where they actually funded a lot of the employee salaries just meaning that they couldn't do many hours and then they came up with other programs like lost subsidy and that was all very quick and so we were real time basically working with the board the leadership team and then all hands meetings with the company nearly daily as well to say this is what we know you know there's so many unknowns but this is what we're working with and this is what we can control And these are all the unknowns that we just can't know what's going to happen.

20:32So let's focus on these ones that we can actually control. Because we were lucky enough to put a bit more money in a little bit later in the journey. And I had to explain why we should do that. The most stark representations of this period is this strong growth of net revenue in January. And then the concept of negative revenue, because you were having to give money back. Just talk about that. Because not only sort of, it's not like orders stop, right? I mean, orders are sort of, there's cash coming out of the business. I mean, not the working capital, but actually customers. Cash. And hence, negative revenue.

21:12Which was soul-destroying, I'm sure. Yeah, completely. Like, because you spent the last year, obviously, acquiring all those customers and whatever else. And to see them all cancelling. and that's what we put in place was what we called the Credit for Future Tours initiative. And that pretty much, I would say, was one of the key things that saved us. So we very quickly, a product team, it was an idea from, I believe, one of the frontline CS people and then a couple of product and engineering guys jumped on it. And within a week, we had this solution where we could basically click a button and then the tour wouldn't be cancelled, but it would be put forward.

21:52their 100 credit would be put on file and and basically said you can book that down the line with no fees and whatever else and so that was a key initiative but yes the cancellations we got we had to give the customer back their full money obviously but then also had to refund the commission that we'd received from the tour operators as well and so that's where the negative revenue uh basically comes from um and so yeah very very scary because you don't know how much of your full inventory that you've booked going forward is going to be exposed is it 100 is it 80 in the end we managed to switch i can't remember the numbers anymore but it was a good over 50 of our bookings over to this credit uh function and that saved so much you know that we didn't have to then refund and issue commissions back to their operators and things like that.

22:48So definitely some quick work by the team. It's a jump on that that really helped things as well at that time. The thing I guess we have to remember is in those days, both your customers and you and the tour operators had no idea how long this was going to last for. No, no idea. which makes it really hard to so i mean we kind of know now right but you remember at the moment you had no idea there's a question i'd love to ask is because inevitably you had to let go people i think there's a happy story which we'll come back to about how you let those people go because some some came back but what was the sort of operating principles that you were you know assuming you had to you had to make some assumptions you know you were getting some government support but you indeed had to let people go during this period yeah for us we had to make some obviously product and engineering were the first areas to go because we were in that 2018-19 period after receiving the tcv funds was all about building up that muscle and capability and everything and so unfortunately we had it's tragic when I think about it we had literally our VP of products so kind of our CPO start on 1st of January 2020 and we had our CMO who was supposed to start on the 1st of April 2020 and so literally scaling up these great people talent to level up the CMO never started obviously because there was no marketing budgets left and no team pretty much amy who was working for us on the vp of product she stayed with us for a while but in the end we agreed to kind of separate uh ways uh but yes we had to decide in terms of where we needed to keep the lights on so where we needed what engineers and what product people we needed to make sure we could still function and one area that we decided not to let a single person go is customer support because what we saw was all the news nightmare stories of people trying to get in touch with uh i don't know emirates or whoever it was lustan british airways whichever british airways whoever it was and the eight hour waits and the 12 hour waits and whatever else to get through and so we said look for our one of our core values is customer first and we truly stuck to that where we said no we're not going to let go of the customer support people because we want people to be able to reach us and deal with this as soon as possible because if there's ever a light at the end of the tunnel hopefully they'll remember that and then we can obviously get those people coming back and booking with us uh and that really helped we actually we had our best nps ever i think it was 75 uh in the year of covid like so because we actually managed to to go through that process so but yeah there was definitely some intentional decisions and other decisions where it's just like we just can't afford these people we just need to let these people go can i ask you because i was i was in a real company uh in this period as well um okay and and we were making reductions in staff as well and i remember so many conversations about how should we do this what's the pacing because as you we just said before we didn't know how long it would take.

26:15We didn't know how badly we would be affected. Our company had multiple different lines. So it was very difficult to figure out what would hit restaurants, what would hit the retail segment and so on, and what would be moved to e-commerce. And for us, it was very much, we were trying to make the decision of making it a one-time thing and then know that we would maybe have to cut deeper than most would understand in the beginning. But then later on, we wouldn't have to come back and say, we're actually making another reduction. How did you think through this? What were the conversations you had and what did you end up doing?

26:57Yeah, there's no right or wrong way. And everyone has the same, I think, thinking that one deep cut is better than multiple and which I saw within the industry. There was some companies who just did like piecemeal you know and it was like six cuts in the end i think in in some companies that i saw and that just killed morale and and obviously it just really hurt we ended up having two so we were in march 2020 uh and we made that cut which was the deepest one because we just didn't know when the end was in sight but we said let's have optimism that within six to nine months that this will be resolved so we tried to keep people that if we saw the way we called it was the awakening like so we had obviously covered but then we called it the the awakening phase who would we need during that awakening phase to make sure that we could actually scale up again and obviously be able to service the customers and and have the right products in place for that so we didn't cut as deep uh to keep that then by basically i think it was august september it started to become pretty clear that this was going to go on for a long time.

28:08And because we were affected more than most other travel companies, like the whole international borders and everything, we then had to make that second cut. And then from that point, we said, look, that's it. So we knew that from our forecasts and everything, we could actually recover and survive this. And obviously, thanks to the internal shareholders for putting up a six million check during the pandemic to help us through that. In addition to the lost subsidies and everything from the Austrian government, that started to give us more confidence to plan for this and make sure that that second cut was it, basically.

28:47I think we should say that you also, I mean, you led this whole reduction in burn personally. And some of your senior team members did and say, look, actually, we're going to reduce our salaries. And we're going to do that as well. We did, yeah. which i think is really important in keeping that morale process going that you know this isn't just this is affecting the whole company yep yeah we did yeah and now it's not easy obviously uh personally to do something like that but it just felt the right thing to do at that time and ask you about how transparent you were there because it's also always one thing to do it but But then how do you communicate it and how openly?

29:36And I think it's incredibly important because we're going through a tech reset now, which is obviously different. But there's definitely there's many businesses that still struggle. And for that reason, I think talking for even though this is COVID and one would say, well, COVID doesn't happen again, hopefully for a long time. but so many startups and and and scale-ups go through this right now um just where it's it's a bit more of a microcosm in terms of which sector is being hit in which company in terms of transparency obviously we tried we shared as much as we could with the team just because as in those days of like where there was complete uncertainty like say and that's what i was saying in the beginning was we tried to just say hey this is what we know we're not hiding anything we're not trying to this is just what we know we can't tell you anymore or give you a decision on something yet and as soon as we can we will so that definitely was something that was appreciated by the team and that was in those daily all hands meetings and then it went to like every two a week and then one a week and then communication through the leadership team to their teams as well in terms of all the different cuts and hours and different things that was also So pretty transparent.

30:51I can't remember exactly what we communicated in terms of the salary reduction of the leadership team, but I'm pretty sure we did say that this was a thing that was happening. So yeah, where we could, we tried to be, that's definitely one of our core values again is transparency over everything. And that really is something we tried to stick to. And Chris sort of touched on it before, but because we did handle it pretty well, obviously it was a pretty terrible time we ended up getting people coming back to us so once covid started to ramp back up again uh we actually started to get uh team members saying hey like and applying for jobs that we were starting to put up uh which was a pretty big you know i guess respect to us that we must have done something well because they came back they loved the culture they loved the vision and what we were trying to do and the purpose but obviously realized that that was just the an extreme circumstance that happened and wanted to be back on board basically.

31:49How did you cope through this period? Because you didn't know any more than anybody else. You had the added, just I suppose, psychological pressure. Man, everything I've just spent the last years creating, I'm dismantling with no certainty of the future. How did you cope through that? extremely difficult to say the least uh so why one thing i talked to people about of what i learned from that was i i was in denial uh i think that this was happening like i was just like okay i it's it's there i'm dealing with it i'm you know the team is dealing with it but and and what was even harder i think for me is you look around you and there's other industries and categories who were thriving because of it and and so like you go from yeah you were on this great trajectory and as you said like we were about to probably do a raise in that year on the best numbers we'd had and so there was a lot of confidence and then to have that carpet literally reached uh ripped out and i had to get to a point where i accepted the business was gone basically in a way and all of that work and all the you know obviously investment and then my assets are all basically in this company got you know and i had to accept that uh and it wasn't until i got to that acceptance point that i truly could move forward uh and i still kind of remember around the time that i did get there like i was uh i did a lot of mountain biking during that time a lot of running uh just being in nature to try and keep my my sane sanity basically i i found that i could be 24 7 answering emails messages doing calls all that kind of stuff but the biggest thing that i needed to do was make good decisions uh and i needed to do that with a clear head uh and the clearest head i possibly could uh because it was pretty impossible to have a clear head at that time i really used those one hour two hour three hour uh exercise and you know sessions where i was outdoors to clear my head and make my decision basically around certain topics or whatever it what's for that particular day.

34:06So that definitely helped me. If you look at my Strava profile, like I did the most kilometers and whatever else, yeah, it goes way up during COVID. I'm still trying to get back to those numbers, but yeah, it definitely was a extraordinary time. I can remember running my business and hearing some really bad news and I was jet lagged in the US, a big customer had decided not to go forward and I went for a super long run. and it doesn't change anything but i completely get that but in in june 2020 you convinced your your investors to give you more money and i don't want for a minute to speak for them but i think a large part of why they said look we're actually suffering across our portfolio but this is one we need to protect i think that was because and we haven't talked about this is the speed at which you changed everything.

35:08I mean, literally overnight. And therefore, you came into a category, and there weren't many, of founders who VCs thought, well, they're part of the solution and not the problem. Meaning, you just said you're in denial, but actually your actions were not in denial. no i think i was running on that adrenaline uh but i think and and it wasn't until that that acceptance came through that you started to not only just get done because that's what you got to do but also then you're productively thinking differently about how you're going to come out of this business and i think that was really key also to the the you know investors who did put money in at that time was to see there was a vision to get out of the hole too so it wasn't just to be coming out the same and then saying hey we're going to replicate what we're doing before and that was what I truly as painful as it was but I truly look back on this experience and say it allowed us to put everything on the table from our entire strategy our vision everything and reinvent that.

36:21And I had that headspace once I had accepted to think through how does this look different on the other side. So that was really a key thing. I'm very happy that we went through that because the business may not have achieved the potential that I think it can if we hadn't had that forced thinking and obviously forced pivoting basically. Just to move on to that subject, I mean, the headline is, you're now back at a revenue level pre-COVID but a lot more profitable well above pre-COVID so actually about 50 percent above uh even more 70 percent above yeah so COVID levels revenue so and yes uh that break even and the unit economics are completely different now so yeah one thing that COVID did teach many was the minimum viable company size.

37:18Probably people realize that that was probably smaller than they thought. Elon Musk is also teaching us all that lately with X. And then of course, there's also the topic of hybrid and remote and in-person. I think both topics are quite interesting to talk about. So let's maybe start on that. You said it before, more profitable, better unit economics. and some of that comes then I imagine from realizing that there's a different minimum viable company. And just doing things smarter. I mean, that's what you also did. Yeah, it's I think critically looking at it. I think this is a bit of a challenge.

37:58When founders do get a sizable amount of money given to them by a later stage investor, you've got to spend that money. and there's a lot of times you don't truly know how to how to spend that and and so it may it forces you to do things you wouldn't do if it was obviously less money in the bank to do that and so definitely for us we went from nearly 300 people at that point just before COVID down to 90. 90 was was really bare minimum to be able to keep everything running and support the customers and and tour operators and everything and we built that back up to around 200 so a bit under 200 uh now and and that really helped and we did that in a much more controlled way like in in the case we're going to hire these engineers we're going to hire another product manager what's it for what's the roi going to be of that is it the short term is it midterm is a longer term like so i love referencing the mckinsey three horizons model uh so that's something that we really uh used a horizon one horizon two horizon three of where we were investing and during covid we actually invested mostly in horizon two and three initiatives because we just had nothing happening in our horizon one like our core business was basically just servicing cancellations uh we had no daily business and no marketing or anything like that so we were able to invest a lot into this future of product development and platform so we built out a whole platform strategy a b2b business everything because we were able to shift the amount of resources clearly as the wheel started to come back we had to bring the team focused on horizon one again so actually on the core business and make sure that we started to get that machine working again and you started to decrease the amount of longer term initiatives that you're working on to ensure that your business at the core was growing was obviously profitable and starting to go through so yeah those those are the things that uh we really used uh and also just more calculated and and in the hiring process as well when you're bringing these new people on because you know okay i didn't have this person before and now i have a budget that can actually uh hire this the team knows they've got to be you know the the a player or they have to be the one who that is going to make a difference when we bring them on board and not just hiring someone because we need to fill a seat or we know we need another back-end engineer or we need another front-end engineer, we really made sure we were very thoughtful during that recovery process.

40:39You expanded some of your, I guess you'd call them products, particularly, for example, in the payments area and started to make additional things with affiliate networks, etc. Were these things you were always going to do and had to delay or are these things that were informed by sort of what you you your your deep thinking as you went that 23rd mile on your hikes or runs or cycles a few ways to answer that so maybe just first on the payments piece so as you can imagine when covid hit there was a lot of calls between between Sean, the CFO, and our Chief Commercial Officer, and our biggest partners, so our tour operators, who had either a lot of money that was in our hands, or we had a lot of money, the customers' money that we'd sent to them, that we were basically trying to work out, where does everyone stand?

41:37Because it was just so unknown. So there was a lot of staring into the eye, like, are you okay, are you okay? And there was a lot of trust and a lot of different handshakes in a way of like, okay, we're gonna be good, if you need to be paid let us know earlier like earlier we need to uh talk about that and that was something we realized could be done so much better and different and transparently and that was what sean uh has really basically the last three years really focused on is that he's uh just transitioned from cfo to a svp of fintech but in the time before he he was transitioning he built out the whole payment orchestration network and what we mean by that is that a customer pays they put their credit card down the money automatically gets split to the tour operator the 80 or whatever the number is that they get paid our commission gets split into another account like a wallet and then if there's a an agent who's helped drive that booking we actually give their commission into another wallet in terms of then what happens at a certain date all money gets released automatically and every operator can log in at any time and see the balance of their wallet so they know i've got a million euros held with tour radar and it's mine so basically i know where it is it's not into some trust account or some working capital account that i have no idea where it is or what it is and so this transparency and visibility was kind of the brainchild of Sean to say, how do we not enter into a situation like COVID again, where no one knows where the money is or what's actually happening.

43:16And so that's what is now in place. We also built out a travel insurance product as part of FinTech, which also for the customer was good at the time to protect themselves. We see amazing attachment rates there, obviously, and it's pure profit basically. So that helps with the unit economics as well. But yeah, the the b2b side of affiliates and and agents this is something that people don't know about our sector is that uh travel agents still drive a lot of bookings uh and actually are a big part of tour operators business because ten thousand dollar safari you kind of want to know can i trust that provider and so you go to an agent physically you trust them and so what we've done is built a portal where any agent in the entire world can sign up, book any of the 50 ,000 adventures and earn a commission on that and not have to go to the operator and say, do you want to give me 10 %?

44:13Do you want to give me 12 %? Do you want to give me 15 %? We basically share the commercials. They can negotiate that down the line as well. But we allow that obviously one place, all agents can sign up, book, and then we've reached into a whole new pool of customers using our platform because they were previously picking up the phone and calling that Namibian tour operator and saying, hey, I've got a booking. How can you pay me? What's a commission that I'm going to get? And then five months later, a commission check is sent across the world to the US. Still literally checks are being sent. Literally, right?