Peek’s Potential Lyft Across the User Adoption Chasm
And Why Lyft Would Jump at the Chance
This is part two of a series of posts about Peek, the online activities booking marketplace. Here are parts one, three, four, and five.
Peek has many attractive features to offer to consumers. On the consumer side, Peek gives travelers the ability to plan and book curated events in foreign destinations. Peek also helpfully reminds travelers about their booked activities before they start, and notifies them about any last minute changes in itinerary. In short, Peek is the hotel concierge 2.0.
On the event and activity operations side (i.e. the tour companies), Peek consolidates a fragmented activity booking market by giving these operators an Opentable-like platform for bookings. This market opportunity represents around $27B in the U.S., and over $100B globally (though the addressable market-size is disputable).
However, on the consumer side, Peek faces stiff competition from the likes of Viator, Zozi, and Get Your Guide (among others), each of whom have raised more than three times the funding Peek has. While Peek has attracted early adopters who prefer its seamless and stunning interface, to keep up its growth, Peek will have to cross the chasm to attract the mainstream market.
To move into the this market, Peek must accomplish two related feats. First, Peek must decidedly surpass its competitors’ product offering. Second, Peek must find a way to create word of mouth among its target market—tech savvy travelers. Building this buzz will be vital in attracting the overly cautious mainstream market. This is particularly true in the realm of travel activities, as travelers, already outside of their comfort zone, seek advice only from sources they trust. But how do travelers deem who is trustworthy? Who curates the curators?
Tweet this: But how do travelers deem who is trustworthy? Who curates the curators?
How can Peek achieve word of mouth when its offerings, by their very nature, serve a disparate population set whose only connection is their shared choice of travel destination? And how can Peek enhance the seamlessness of its core consumer product?
By partnering with Lyft—leveraging both its core function of moving people to their destinations and its core community oriented ethos.
Peek could enhance the seamlessness of their customer’s experience by entering into a partnership with Lyft to offer transportation to each activity, just as a hotel concierge does. However, unlike a hotel concierge, Peek is mobile. Travelers could be picked up from their wanders in the city rather than waiting in the hotel lobby for their pre-arranged transportation to show up. The Peek app could use its existing reminder service to not only remind tourists of their upcoming activities but also ask them if they wanted to get a Lyft to arrive to their activity on time.
The Lyft experience will improve the overall Peek experience too. Lyft’s reviews are generally fantastic because “hailing” the driver is easy, payment is seamless, and drivers are talkative and friendly with their passengers. A traveler’s experience on each Peek activity is likely to be colored by the transportation that bookends this activity—giving Peek an additional boost over their competition.
Peek could also leverage Lyft’s larger user base by providing offers to Lyft users who Lyft determines are traveling (using Lyfts in cities other than their home city). Peek would profit-share in these bookings while attracting new users to its service.
Finally, this partnership would benefit Peek by sufficiently focusing word of mouth to create a reinforcing feedback loop. Currently, Peek users who have enjoyed specific experiences are disconnected from the next wave of travelers, preventing word of mouth from developing.
But in a foreign destination, who do travelers talk to the most, and seek advice from? The gregarious taxi driver. His ears perk up when he hears about a tourist’s experience, because he is the ultimate tour guide, the connector whose expertise about a city’s attractions is implicitly trusted by travelers. Lyft is even more attractive than the traditional taxi in this regard because their marketing is specifically aimed at people who want friendly car ride service that feels like a community, and they specifically screen drivers for this quality.
If Peek partnered with Lyft, the drivers would more frequently hear about travelers’ enjoyable experiences with Peek activities; each story would reinforce Peek’s brand and value. Eventually, a tipping point would be reached where drivers, now trusting Peek’s offerings, would suggest specific experiences on Peek.com. The Lyft driver would have a ready answer to the time-old question, “what’s cool to do here?”
“I heard about a great food and cocktail walking tour, just check Peek.com.”
But Why Would Lyft Bother?
What would compel Lyft to partner with Peek? Lyft is locked in a battle with Uber and needs to maintain its focus on launching new cities, winning its pricing skirmishes, and being the first choice of a mainstream market that is still using taxi-cabs, right? Sure, the partnership could drive more rides Lyft’s way, but why spend the time and energy with a small, travel-oriented startup, as opposed to pursuing other avenues of growth?
Because reaching consumers while we’re on vacation is the relatively rare time when we are not governed by habits, and are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.”
Normally, it is very difficult to alter our consumption behavior. When we’re in a situation normally governed by a habit, the cue to perform a routine task, like stumbling out of a pub, causes our brain to offload a task, finding transportation home, to the basal ganglia, the brain’s auto-pilot. The prefrontal cortex, center of conscious decision-making, is never involved. If we’re in the habit of hailing a taxi or Uber? That habit will probably stay fixed, with price-cuts and new-customer discounts having little effect.
But on vacation? On vacation we’re jolted out of auto-pilot. True decision-making once again takes place. It’s why “changing a habit on a vacation is one of the proven most-successful ways to do it.” Since marketers have such few and fleeting windows to truly change our behavior, they spend huge budgets to hit these windows.
A partnership with Peek would offer Lyft a channel to customers whose behaviors are at their most malleable: tourists. It would therefore make sense for Lyft to offer free or heavily discounted rides to Peek customers. Lyft clearly believes in making these types of offers to win-over customers. The free or discounted rides that Lyft throws at people stuck in their habits would be be more effectively targeted at Peek travelers who are open to behavioral change.
Tweet this: A partnership with Peek would offer Lyft a channel to customers whose behaviors are at their most malleable: tourists.
Peek customers could be additionally segmented by region and price. Lyft could offer its new luxury service to Peek travelers with expensive tastes. Lyft also currently offers free rides for two weeks in cities in which they have just launched to generate word of mouth. With this partnership, Lyft could target people in those launch cities as well as pre-launch cities. People love to come home from vacations and gush about their experiences—wouldn’t Lyft love if its service was one of those experiences?
This partnership would also provide Lyft with increased mouth. Travelers often speak to tour guides and to each other about their experiences, and often solicit advice and information about from both their guides and their brethren. If two of the travelers on a shared activity arrive in a mustachioed Lyft and rave about the driver’s friendliness and the service’s ease of use, might this influence their fellow travelers to try Lyft? Tour guides, finding that customers arrive in better spirits, and—on time!, might start suggesting Lyft to future customers.
To be sure, creating an integrated user experience across the Lyft and Peek web and mobile applications would present difficult questions and technical challenges to each company’s respective product and business development teams. Would Peek offer a “Lyft Me There” check-box at checkout or directly after checkout? Or just in an email offer? Would Peek directly connect to Lyft’s API and input user (and new user) information (besides payment)? Would the Peek and Lyft apps directly interact in the pick-up process (as Google Maps and Uber now does)?
The hard-work of pursuing a partnership would pay off though. Peek would not only be offering a seamless planning and booking, but would also be able to entice bookings with free or discounted rides. And Lyft drivers would recommend Peek to travelers. For its part, Lyft would gain a channel long-prized by marketers—tourists willing to dip their toe into a new experience (and potentially turning them into not just users, but Lyft evangelists.)
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