Goodbye Marketplace

Over the last year we have been working hard to bring a community of travellers and local experts together, enabling people in new places to find and buy interesting and useful services. That community evolved into what we called the Concierge99 Marketplace.

We’ve had some great successes and have enriched holidays in places such as London, Granada and Lisbon - and want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been involved thus far. Unfortunately, we just haven’t seen the level of traction in the Concierge99 Marketplace that we need in order to further invest in and grow that part of our offering.

That’s why, in November 2016, we decided to shut down the marketplace area of our broader Concierge99 service to refocus our energies and resources on new and related projects as well as expand some of our existing services - such as the Top 5 Guides (which have been shared over 40,000 times so far), our nascent Chatbot (launched in October 2016) and two new areas we’re very excited about that have launched recently - travel inspired Local Food and Drink Recipes and our Tools to Enrich Travel.

RIP Marketplace!

We’d like to take a few moments to reflect on why the Concierge99 Marketplace itself did not work out as, like anything, this is a learning experience.  

We firmly believe that enabling local people to provide services to people on holiday is A) a good business model; B) a great way to invigorate local economies; and C) an even better way for people to truly experience a new city.  It was and remains a great idea - as evidenced by recent expansions and acquisitions in this space by major players such as Airbnb.  

However we were unable to crack two specific areas crucial for any online marketplace:  

• Firstly, we found it difficult to get significant levels of customer traction.  As a startup we needed to be able to attract travellers, probably just before or when they are actually ON holiday, and then present them with a local service they want to buy right there and then.  And we had to do that with almost no brand recognition.  Ultimately, we were unable to achieve this in a replicable and cost effective way.  We found models that gave us some success but to scale them would have required significant capital investment from outside parties, an avenue we weren't quite ready to go down.
• Secondly, we were unable to convince users that there was enough value in the platform so that they didn’t take their monetary transactions offline where the opportunity presented itself.  This clearly points to an issue with both making the transactions within our marketplace easier than taking them offline, AND providing auxiliary services around the transaction to make it beneficial.  Unfortunately, whilst being able to see the problem, the solution remains elusive.

We would like to sincerely thank everyone who joined the marketplace - those who offered services, those who purchased services and those who just browsed - you all contributed to the success we did manage to have and also to the learnings we take away from closing this area. 
We are really excited about the new services that we've chosen to focus our resources on. Take a look at the links above to see all the new developments. 

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or concerns at all.  We always love to hear from you and look forward to continuing our relationship in the future.