Headout is a managed marketplace that curates experience providers and helps them design, price, and operate tours and activities. The company supplies free software, enforces strict quality control, and works continuously with partners to maintain standards. It operates in about 50 cities worldwide.
Chapters
might be helpful if you could give us a kind of high-level overview of Headout as a marketplace and maybe even touch on some unique aspects of it for context.
Yeah, for sure. So at the very core of what we do, we're all about inspiring and providing access to people to go and indulge in real-life experiences. The name Headout literally comes from what we're trying to achieve, which is to, you know, get people to head out and see the world, see the sights in it, meet people, do new things. And if we're able to sort of do this enough in a way where we're inspiring people to do this more often than not, then hopefully in the next decade or so, people will start looking at the idea of going out and indulging in a real-life experience as a utility versus sort of an indulgence or luxury, which is sort of what it's looked at as today. Um, so that's the reason of why we do what we do, right? In terms of, uh, our approach or our model, we're a managed marketplace. What that essentially means is that we don't just work with any and every sort of experience provider out there. We curate them heavily, we sit down with them, we look at their entire portfolio of experiences, and we create new experiences with them, uh, including experiences which are designed by our experts in terms of what they contain, at what time they run, at what price points do they, uh, do they sort of offer their services, and so on and so forth. So we do a lot of legwork in the actual creation and designing of the core experience. We then provide them our entire software where they're able to give us real-time access to inventory, guide timetables, dynamic pricing, and whatnot. And we do all of this for free for them in terms of the software. And once all of this is done, we get them to pass our QC layer where we heavily audit and invest time and effort and in some cases money as well in upgrading the services. And after we have done all of this backend work, we then bring them live to the platform and we then sort of keep working with them very closely to keep iterating and ensuring that the end experience remains consistently standardized and of a high pedigree. So think of us in some sense as what Hilton does with a property owner where there is a property owner who has an asset but Hilton then sort of comes in and sets sets the standards, sets the processes, this gives them technology, gives them, uh, the entire know-how of how to run that hotel. We do exactly that but for experienced providers, and we do this in about 50 cities right now all over the world.
