Mainstreaming the Peek Marketplace
Peek is building the destination activities market. But will anyone use it?
This is part one of a series of posts about Peek, an online activities booking marketplace. Here are parts two, three, four, and five.
It’s never been easier to book a room, make a dinner reservation, or find a cheap flight. Yet, filling a long afternoon in a new city inevitably requires rummaging for a guide book or polling a social network for a recommendation. The challenge of finding destination activities in a new city has long been addressed by tour companies, travel agencies, or by plowing through mountains of home brewed research. But, how can a connected traveler leverage mobile technology to access curated experiences on the fly?
Peek addresses these challenges twofold: by providing activity and experience destinations an OpenTable-like backend system to reach new customers, and by enticing potential buyers with the ability to book from a personalized list of activities directly from a mobile app or the web. Yet, despite this pincer approach to destination activity booking, the company is still in its early growth stages with many challenges to come.
In his Skift Special Report, “Why the tours and activities market is more hype than the next big thing,” journalist Dennis Schaal notes that Kayak’s termination of its partnership with GetYourGuide might be the first sign of “inflated prognostications” within the activities booking market. And it’s true: many travel related startups have struggled to gain traction. The space is filled with companies like Wanderfly and iGottaGuide, quietly acquired by larger booking sites, or companies like Gtrot and Wander, which stray from travel.
Travel remains a focus of immense attention, however. Trippy’s recent switch to a Q&A-based travel planning service just netted it an A round worth $3.5M, and GoGoBot, which is broadening its offerings to take on larger booking services, seems full steam ahead. With the launch of GoGoBot’s Tribes, it is offering a new level of customization to its customers, and hotel booking features on web and mobile demonstrate its willingness to dive more deeply into territory ruled by the large booking services.
Is Peek’s platform for experiences enough to push it past its early growth and into the mainstream?
What does Peek offer?
On the consumer side, Peek offers a personalized and curated destination activities e-commerce experience. Accessible either through the web or an iOS app, Peek’s list of activities run a gamut from adventure sports to fine dining, and each is displayed with sumptuous images and engaging copy. Users are able to filter by city and by type of activity, and the “Perfect Day” feature provides a narrative account of favorite activities from a regional celebrity. Booking is straightforward and the experience a fairly immersive and friction free process.
As Ruzwana Bashir, Peek’s CEO and co-founder, describes during a CNBC interview, the activities provided by Peek aim to curate superior experiences, not be a compendium of all the activities a region provides. With the vastness of options available on competing travel services, and the enormity of travel planning complexity, providing a smaller subset of options makes Peek a very accessible experience and aims to cultivate a level of brand-trust that the aggregators cannot provide.
Additionally, and in the mobile experience in particular, Peek personalizes the options available through a fun photo sorting process. On first opening the app, a user swipes through a few images to characterize their activity preferences.
OpenTable’s recent purchase of Ness, the personalized restaurant recommendation engine, demonstrates the importance of a mobile strategy catered to the unique needs of an individual. Peek is rolling that functionality right into its own product, avoiding OpenTable’s $17M expense to acquire it.
On the B2B side, Peek aims to become the “OpenTable of destination activities,” according to CEO and co-founder Ruzwana Bashir. Booking tools and services and a popular marketplace bring monetizable value to Peek while building its role as the best provider of booking services to an industry rife with inadequate tools. Activity providers see vast potential benefit through the use of robust booking services, increased visibility, and an opportunity to incentivize bookings in less utilized times of the day or week.
Peek faces a complex and contested competitive landscape. However, their emphasis on building a powerful back-end system with inherent financial value and mating it with an attractive and high-quality consumer experience give it a distinct advantage.
Crossing the chasm
Mainstreaming Peek’s value proposition is a challenge. As it is now, destination activity booking has received outsized attention that belies the actual awareness of the service in the mind of the buying public. And, though Peek is in a rush to expand, the regions and markets served by these curated booking sites is, ultimately, an infinitesimal slice of its potential. To crib from Geoffrey A. Moore’s classic business title, Crossing the Chasm, companies like Peek have yet to manage the gap between early adopters and the early majority.
Since 1991, the technology industry has pointed to Moore’s text when seemingly excellent products and companies flounder after experiencing initial success. Why, CEOs and investors so often ask, do great ideas fail to catch on? Moore identifies that the traditional high-tech marketing curve—one that moves from innovators through early adopters and to the early majority—fails to account for the significant and intractable psychographic differences between these groups.
For example, early adopters—from whom most startups get their first glimmers of success—“are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their other concerns.” [Moore, 2014, Part 1 “High-Tech Marketing Illusion”] They are the group most often to see a technology’s or service’s value, incorporate it into their own life, and work to experience its benefit. They can be wonderful evangelists.
On the other hand, the early majority—from whom most startups reap their most profit—is much more pragmatic. A new technology or service must, for them, have already proven its value on the marketplace before they will consider incorporating it into their lives. Disruptive innovation is, after all, a challenge to users as well as industries. Most startups fail here not because their innovation holds no value, but because they treat the early majority as just an extension of the early adopters. They are not.
And, all the evangelism accomplished by those early adopters falls upon a pragmatism that makes truly remarkable services, like Peek’s, stutter and slow.
Business Development to the Rescue
I’ve worked with a number of my Tradecraft colleagues to brainstorm solutions to Peek’s chasm. We found a few compelling strategic opportunities for Peek to expand their offering more deeply into the mainstream. Just like OpenTable built its consumer success on a platform of POS and backend sales, Peek can leverage unique relationships with other industries to become more prevalent and salient in the minds of its target consumers.
We put together a series of posts here on Medium to describe some of the opportunities we see available to Peek. Most often, the opportunities are an extension of Peek’s travel experience. Devon Edwards’ post, Peek’s Potential Lyft Across the User Adoption Chasm, suggests a partnership with Lyft to provide travelers transportation to and from destination activities. Similarly, Bartosz Malutko’s A Peek into a Shared Economy suggests that FlightCar, with its GetAround-like ride sharing at the airport, would provide Peek’s users the convenience of airport transportation and a little extra change on the side.
Matt Johnston’s Offering the Patrons of Professional Sports Events Peek Experiences suggests a business development deal with one of the large sporting events leagues, like the PGA Tour. Well heeled golf afficianados are willing to travel from sea to sea for the Tour, but often have hours of downtime in their destination cities. Why not fill that with some peak experiences?
Lastly, Farah Wahab’s Peek, Hipmunk, and Happiness suggests a partnership with the flight and hotel booking service Hipmunk to complete the “one stop shop” experience.
The five of us are part of Tradecraft, a traction factory training smart people to succeed in sales and business development roles at early stage startups. Give us a holler, we’re nice.
