Adam discusses building Luxury Escapes as a marketplace, drawing on retail experience to shape early decisions. The company prioritizes customer service with a 24/7 call center and high NPS scores, accepting higher customer acquisition costs in exchange for lifetime value in the travel space.
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So, you know, kind of going back to, you know, the early days of starting Luxury Escapes, like what were the first kind of steps that you actually took to start it as a marketplace?
What's interesting about Luxury Escapes is we had that background. So we had our local business that had hundreds of products on the site and we'd learned a lot in those first couple of years. So you've learned, obviously learned how to treat customers, you learned how to work with vendors, you learned how to control refunds, all that kind of stuff you picked up. Certainly customer satisfaction, NPS is a big one and how important it is to maintain that customer relationship, which is, a little bit unusual because obviously most marketplaces are fairly hands-off as much as they can with customers. They kind of let it do its thing, whereas we've been far more hands-on. That's partly due to the nature of travel. When you're buying a pair of scissors on eBay, the customer experience, you don't want it to be terrible. You want the product to come and be of a relatively good quality, but other than that, that's kind of what you care about. Whereas travel, there's much more touch points, much more risk, much more concern from the customer who wants to have a good experience. So you can have a Booking.com or Expedia-style free marketplace and they tend to give pretty ordinary customer service. So it's almost impossible to speak to somebody on the phone at the big online travel agents, OTAs, a bit Booking, Expedia, Ctrip, and to an extent Airbnb. Whereas we've always had much more of the high touch. So we've got a 24/7 call center. You can call us anytime, any day of the year at 3:00 AM and somebody will answer the phone, which is almost unheard of in any business. And it's certainly unheard of in the travel business. That just doesn't exist. So we've always had a much higher touch, understanding that it's a much higher LTV and a much higher CPA. So in that nature of it, it's sort of that highly curated flash marketplace. We had one type of customer and one type of client. And then as we've transitioned to a fuller marketplace, again, it differs again and much more hands-off and always on. But yeah, it's been an interesting journey as we sort of learned a lot along the way and learned from the early days just the importance of LTV and the importance of treating customers well.
